Chapter 13

Stella wiped the sweat from her face with the towel offered by Mei, then sniffed and made a face.

"Damn!" she exclaimed. "I need a shower! How long was I in that thing, anyway."

"About three hours," Mei replied. "So, I take it you like our little simulator?"

Stella's face brightened as she replied "Oh, that was fun! I'm not quite sure what all that was about, but I had a ball doing it! I mean, it's not quite like real life because there are certain limitations and restrictions on people's movements and so forth, but once I had those figured out, it was almost like what I used to do in the real world. So, is that just a game for your occasional amusement, or is there a purpose to it?"

Mei felt the others' approval even as she decided it was time to let Stella in on at least part of the secret of the VR setup.

"What you were working on was the data that was recorded from the network and the CIA's computers from the time of the break-in that started this whole affair - the reason you were set to spy on Darren, and the reason we went to Hong Kong. Darren went through the sim on this data shortly after it was recorded, and while what he discovered was enough to set us on the right track, you uncovered some new data that we never realized was in there. Would you like to see the printout?"

"Sure!"

Mei opened the manila folder she was carrying that contained a single sheet of laser printed paper with dates, IP addresses, and the names belonging to those addresses. This was the real-world representation of the trail that Stella had followed in simulation. One address, and the name associated with it, appeared several times. Stella recognized the name and her eyebrows shot up.

"Does this mean what I think it means?" she asked.

"Yes," was Mei's only reply.

"Whoa!" Stella breathed, shocked at the magnitude of her discovery.

"What the hell is this all about?!" Patterson stormed through the door of the oval office without acknowledging the room's other occupants. "They made me surrender my weapon at security! Said it was a 'new policy' or some such nonsense!"

"Please have a seat, Donald." Stephanie didn't bother to rise from her chair. "Then we can talk like civilized beings instead of ranting and raving at each other."

The DCIS pulled up short, years of training and self-discipline causing his piercing gaze to sweep the room before settling on the face of the President. Collecting the shreds of his dignity, he lowered himself into the only unoccupied chair in the space before the President's desk.

"What's with all the muscle, Madame President?" he asked, as if nothing had happened.

"Can't be too careful these days, Donald." Stephanie replied. Let him think she feared for her life after the assassination attempt. Perhaps it would make this easier.

"I have a report here, from Gemini/Winchell Security Systems, regarding the CNOOCO affair." She continued, taking a folder from the stack on her right. "There are some things in here I need to discuss with you."

"I thought they had put that one to bed," Patterson said.

"They thought so too, but it seems they have a new data analyst who discovered some information that was overlooked before."

"Well, I have to say, they've already made my guys look like amateurs on this, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised," he shrugged. "What'd they come up with?"

"Just this..." Stephanie handed the folder across the desk.

She waited a few seconds until his face registered his understanding of the import of the data before continuing.

"Donald Patterson, you are hereby relieved of your position as DCIS, and are placed under arrest for treason," she stood as she spoke. "You have betrayed the trust of this office and of the American people by conspiring to provide critical intelligence data to a foreign nation, and by aiding and abetting an attempt by a foreign government to assassinate the President of the United States."

His face gone suddenly white, Patterson allowed the folder to slip from his nerveless fingers. "I... You..."

A clumsy hand rose to swipe across his suddenly sweaty brow, then, taking deep breath, he regained his composure.

"It was all your fault, you know," he told Stephanie. "It's bad enough that the idiots elected a female President, but you had to saddle me with those freaks your father calls a security force! Thirty-five years I've put into keeping this country safe, and what do I get out of it? A lousy government pension and a handshake, while being shown how obsolete I am. Obsolete my ass! I almost got away with it! Would have, too, if it hadn't been for those damned genetically engineered mutants! That would have shown who's obsolete!"

The speech was delivered while standing in front of his chair, and he seemed to have wound down, so the Secret Service agents removed their hands from inside their jackets. Patterson moved as though to sit, then, with surprising speed and agility leaped across the desk, a small bladed knife in his right hand.

The agents were taken by surprise, but so was the attacker. Something deflected the blade as it slashed across the President's throat, and he never got another chance to try. Stephanie's reflexes, trained since childhood by her father's bodyguards, took over. Her right hand almost casually slapped the knife-wielding wrist, sending the weapon flying, and the U-shaped edge between her left thumb and forefinger chunked solidly into the former spook's defenseless throat, crushing his larynx.

Donald Patterson had just enough time to realize he was being killed by a woman before his heart burst under the onslaught of a series of punches to the chest.

"You always did underestimate me, Donald," Stephanie told the dying man as she stepped back and let the body fall. Liam rushed to her side, trying to pull her out of harm's way.

"He's not going to hurt me, Liam." The gentleness of her voice did as much to stop the Secret Service man's effort as did her resistance to his efforts

"No, no!" Stella told the technician irritably. "It needs to be less realistic so that I can manipulate it directly! I don't want a simulation of real life, just an abstraction of the data that lets me navigate and control what I'm seeing without hiding it from me. It's all well and good that the person monitoring my session sees the real data, but if I don't know instantly what I'm seeing, I can't react fast enough, especially on live data. See that, right there? That's a database, I think, but I can't get in because you show it as some kind of impenetrable vault. I want to see it as a potential source of data, and I also want to see what's guarding it so I can manipulate it on the fly."

"Here, let me see if I can help," Bob, the CTO of Hastings Enterprises plugged a portable hard drive into a USB port of the computer that controlled the simulation. "This is something I've been working on for myself. I guess some of us want a little more direct control..."

As the hard drive spun up, he plugged another pair of devices into other ports. As they powered up, each projected four low power laser beams into the room. Working carefully, Bob positioned the devices to either side of a comfortable chair, then adjusted them until each of the four laser beams intersected its counterpart at a distance of about two feet from front of the chair.

Unplugging the VR headset, he replaced it with a much lighter unit that appeared to be a monocle attached to a pair of headphones.

"Okay, sit here. You can take the gloves off."

As Stella complied, and the Gemini girls looked on in wonder, Bob tapped rapidly at the control console's keyboard.

"Now, we wait for the installation to complete... That ought to do it," he said, turning back to Stella as a three dimensional image appeared in the air in front of her. "Can we reduce the light level in here? Thanks."

Sun, who was nearest the door, turned the dimmer switch to lower the lights to about a third of their normal level.

"Okay," Bob said, shifting his attention from Stella to the hologram in front of her. "This is your console. You can't feel it, so you'll have to get used to the positions of things. The upside is that it can be reconfigured to suit your needs by simply grabbing the image of a control and dragging it where you want it. The other stuff will rearrange itself if it needs to. You operate the console with your left hand. The trackball is your steering mechanism. Turn left or right by moving it sideways, and forward and back by going the other way, good! Now, if you see something you want to examine more closely, just reach out with your right hand and grab it. If you pull it to you it will enlarge and show you more detail. With this button, you can capture it in memory. This button allows you to change your scale to navigate through whatever you grabbed, sort of like 'Honey, I shrunk the kids' except that this button unshrinks you back to your previous scale. You can dive as far into the data as the actual bit pattern, but be careful about perspective, especially in a hostile environment. That's what the monocle is for. The button under your left thumb controls the scale it sees, but it can never be less than one level above where your main zoom is. You'll have to practice so that you don't lose track of what's happening in the monocle."