Chapter 10

Custer had had a plan.

Right now, I envied him. Admittedly, the end result of his plan was a couple of thousand Sioux Indians descending on him like a dropped anvil, but at least he had started with a plan.

Right now, I was faced with a puzzle. I had to get Dr. Dementoid in front of this computer so he could complete whatever sequence was hanging it up. And then I had to get him to show me how to use the computer to re-write Lauren Tremont back into history as an award-winning teen sensation. And I had to do of all of this without letting him use the computer to take charge of things, turn Lauren back into a sex slave, and ride off into the sunset with some new victims, which, if his speech just now was any indication, should make much of Hollywood's female A-list a little uneasy. Not to mention the various Starbucks employees and young children of the region, of course.

What worried me most was the voice command business. I know both he and Lauren had alluded to inadvertently triggering something by voice. That made me very wary of letting him near enough to this thing to be picked up by whatever microphones were in place to capture voice commands. But if I marched him in with hands bound and mouth taped, I had the funny feeling that his computer instructional ability would be somewhat limited.

I had a computer genius en route to Manhattan, but getting him out here to Ithaca would be problematic, and quite frankly, I didn't trust him all that much either. He would be great as long as he viewed this as a theoretical exercise, but if he ever got the idea that he could manipulate the fabric of the universe to score hot chicks, I wasn't too confident in his ability to resist temptation.

What I was lacking, I decided, was more information. "The more you read and learn, the less your adversary will know." I said aloud.

"What?" asked Lauren, who had been waiting patiently for me to come out of my creative fog.

"What, you never mumble Sun Tzu aphorisms to yourself?" I rejoined indignantly.

She grinned. "No, I can't say I have."

"Well, I wish Sun Tzu were able to offer some advice here." I explained my concerns to Lauren.

Lauren thought for a moment and then asked, "Do you know how to shoot that gun he brought?"

"I do."

"Can he talk faster than you can shoot?"

I looked at her, surprised.

"More important: do you think he's willing to risk losing that contest?" she added.

"But the same question applies to us, Lauren... or to you, anyway. Are you willing to risk having him die and losing any chance of fixing things?"

She caught my gaze and held it. "Yes," she said simply. "If he wins and turns me back into a brainless sex toy, I... I know I can't handle that. And I don't want to risk it. And if I can't... if I can't get my old life back, Rick, that I can handle. And I want to try. And if you try, you risk. It's that simple."

And so the decision was made.

I explained to Victor in very clear terms what the rules would be. I emphasized that I would have a loaded, cocked automatic pistol pointed at his head at all times, and if he felt he could talk faster than the six one-hundredths of a second it would take for me to pull the trigger and splatter his brains everywhere, he was welcome to try. I could see he remembered my earlier comment about being happy if Lauren didn't get restored, and as best I could tell, he bought that bluff completely.

And so we were completely prepared for everything.

Of course, so was Custer.

The entry into the room was almost disappointingly anti-climactic. Lauren was armed with a heavy-duty six-cell flashlight that easily illuminated the scene, and I kept my promise with respect to the pistol pointed unwaveringly at our guide. The heavy steel door swung easily aside, and Victor/Courtney removed the branch from the threshold that had been preventing it from completely closing. "I put this here to get around the fingerprint scanner," he said, "not having the right fingerprints any more."

There was a short entryway with a disturbingly low ceiling; I could feel my hair brushing against the top of the tunnel. But it almost immediately opened up into a room that was essentially a large dome, a semi-spherical expanse reaching perhaps fifty feet above the floor at its height. In the middle of the circular floor was a raised circular platform some fifteen feet in diameter. Mounted above it was a radial arm supporting something that looked vaguely like a satellite dish, pointed downwards at the platform. To the left, against the curved wall, was a set of lit panels containing electronic controls of some kind. One panel had a keyboard and monitor inset, and a telephone handset next to it. Amber lights from this setup gave the room its only real light apart from our flashlight.

I heard Victor give a deep sigh, and was unsure whether it was relief or something more sinister.

"OK," whispered. "What now?"

"Now", he whispered back, "Lauren needs to go stand on the platform there. After she does, I will give a command to the computer. The computer will respond that it cannot execute the command because a previous enumeration is pending, and ask if it should re-attempt the enumeration. I will then say, 'Yes.' After that, you will hear a hum, and possibly see a sort of sparkle around Lauren."

"Possibly?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's weird," he said conversationally, seeming to forget for a moment that I was holding a loaded pistol on him. "Some people see the sparkle and some don't. It doesn't appear on videotapes of the process. We think it has to do with individual sensitivity to the free induction decay of the ether fabric material, but that's only a..."

I held up my hand. "Let's save the physics lesson for another time, OK?"

"Sure, of course. Sorry." He turned to Lauren. "Any time you're ready."

I looked at her. She was pale and trembling. I pulled her to me and hugged her, whispering, "You don't have to do this. We can find anoth..."

"No," she cut me off. "I have to try." She pulled back a bit, and then planted a lingering kiss on me. "Just in case I don't get a chance to do that again," she whispered.

Before I could reply, she pulled free and walked unhesitatingly to the middle of the raised platform, turning around and facing us at its center, waiting.

I looked hard at Victor. "Go ahead. And for all our sakes, pal, remember that this would be a very very bad time to be stupid."

He/she nodded like a marionette, having to remind himself to stop. I hoped that meant he was taking this as seriously as he needed to. He turned to me and whispered, "I'm going to say, 'Hey hey hey.' That's the prefatory voice command. We set it up that way so that we didn't accidentally trigger some command in the middle of ordinary conversation."

"Why 'Hey hey hey'?" I asked. It was a stupid question, but I was nervous about actually letting him start this thing and like a kid, I was delaying the inevitable with questions.

"Well, the device above the platform is the Field Activation Transmitter, and the mesh that's buried under the platform is the Activation Limiting Barrier. FAT-ALB. Get it? Fat Albert?"

"Ha, ha," I said sourly. I paused, realizing I had run out of excuses. "OK. Do it."

He turned to face the platform and said loudly, "Hey hey hey, list processes."

From the corner of my eye I could see some of the lights from the consoles off to the side jump from amber to green, and a pleasant female Microsoft Sam-type voice responded from nowhere, "Processes cannot be listed while an enumeration is pending." There was a pause, and then the voice continued, "Do you want to re-try the pending enumeration?"

"Hey hey hey yes," he answered.

My heart was in my throat and I was putting more pressure than was safe on the trigger of the gun I was holding. I was trying to watch Lauren, the panel, and Victor all at once, but my attention was drawn completely to Lauren as a small electrical hum started. I was seized with a desperate desire to yell at him to stop, but before I could even form the words the entire platform area was bathed in a dizzying array of sparking lights, as though a nation of fireflies had decided to celebrate their independence day. It lasted for perhaps three seconds, and I was just about to yell that something had gone wrong when the lights winked out and the hum stopped abruptly.

"Enumeration complete," announced the automated voice flatly. "Display results?"

"Hey hey hey yes," he answered again.

"Subject has an active index. The active index is American Idol Girl. There are five active temp deltas for this subject. The active temp deltas are House, School, New York Concert, Sex Slave Mode, Protect Me Mode. No deltas are applied. There are no pending deltas in the analysis queue. There are no pending deltas in the activation queue."

"Are you done?" I whispered furiously.

"With her, yeah," he whispered back.

"Lauren, come back here." I said.

She stepped gingerly off the platform and walked towards us. "Are you ok?" I asked her.

She frowned for a moment and said, "I guess so. I don't feel any different."

Victor said, "Of course not. I didn't do anything to you. All we did was let the machine finish a sequence. Now we have to do me."