Chapter 4

It didn't take a brain surgeon to figure out who was pushing the snooping on Claiborne. To confirm it, we accessed the logs the company kept of who had used spyeyes to visit the school. It wasn't called snooping, but that's what it amounted to. One name appeared on both lists, someone who fit Shannon's definition of an idiot (not her words; hers were a lot more pungent). Here was someone who had a ton of money, all inherited, not terribly much sense, and a feeling (from his writings) of entitlement and that he was somehow superior to everyone else.

"Bet you'll find he has Lefty politics," Shannon said when she joined us. She'd been missing a lot, present at school, but not really joining in things. She had come home with me following her mother's funeral, but a day later she'd said she had to leave. It was like she vanished. She showed up from time to time, but I began to suspect she had something else going on in her life.

"The records don't say that," I told her, "but he's contributed to a lot of Liberal causes."

"I'll be polite and call him a fuck head," Shannon said. "He's a small fish, but we need to discourage such behavior."

"Free speech."

"Yeah, I know," she sighed. "Don't worry, nothing will happen to him, just the things he supports. His type won't be easily disillusioned, but I'm going to try."

"What are you going to do?"

She shook her head. "Ah-ah-ah, I'm not telling. You'll see me at school, but I'm going to be hard to find." She tapped the page where I'd written out the final version of my idea. "I like this. I may use part of it myself." With that she was gone, leaving us to look at each other.

Mr. Robert Gordon slipped into the Construct, never noticing that we were ghosting along on his snoop. He slipped through the walls of Claiborne, the real one, not the clone we'd built. We were ready when he hit the button to record. And for the next hour he recorded everything.

In a way it was interesting to follow him around. After panning over the usual group of kids having sex in the alcove near the lockers, he made directly for the restrooms. In the past he'd been blocked from going in. He should have suspected that having total access was wrong, but he didn't. He recorded the girls in the stalls and the boys at the urinals. He zoomed in a little on everyone, which had to be a gross invasion of privacy, and panned back to catch close-ups of the girls.

Then it was on to the gym, and the kids swimming in the pool, and the impromptu orgy that always happened in the shower. Alex thinned the spray so he could see everything that was going on. He zoomed in for some tremendous close-ups, proving he really was a bit of a pervert.

He didn't get much in the way of sex while classes were in session, but he made sure he got plenty of close-ups of the teachers.

"What do you think he'll do?" Irene asked as his allotted time was up and he withdrew. He hadn't seen what sometimes happened after class when a teacher and a student would get it on.

"He'll probably go home and beat off," Jared said. "After that?" He shrugged.

"I wonder if he'll look at what he recorded?" I asked.

Irene laughed. "Bets? He's probably so excited about what he got that he won't think."

In any case, we'd made our play. He'd seen everything there was to see, but all anyone would have would be his word. We'd gone after the recording he'd made, but subtly, not overtly. Now it was time to do some additional work. We spent a few minutes distributing Claiborne's resources, hiding them as other files, hiding parts behind firewalls, and remoting more than a few of them. This was something Alex had learned how to do, and he directed us. The only point of weakness was the master catalog, and that was held under a key-code access that would need all of us to agree to open. With that done, we went back upstairs and resumed our classes.

Mr. Gordon went in one more time, but this was after a meeting with the Construct's Management with lawyers present on both sides. They all viewed his recording, and saw right away that every kid had the same face, something we had done, but Mr. Gordon hadn't checked. And nobody else could access what he could. It made him look like someone who was willing to fabricate evidence to get what he wanted, and totally destroyed his case. The Construct's lawyers even implied that he had made up all of the evidence, pointing to a number of things that looked copied from one alcove to another (which was some of Jared's work).

Mr. Gordon didn't come back after that. And the lawsuit was dismissed out of hand with a whopping big fine thrown in as well as court costs. I followed things briefly. Mr. Gordon tried his best to make people believe that there was a non-stop orgy going on in Claiborne, but his recording destroyed his case and credibility. It even destroyed the possibility that other parents would try the same thing.

"I had nothing to do with that," Shannon said the next time I saw her and asked about the judge. "He had the bad luck to get a judge who thinks for himself. That was kind of risky, you know."

"So was that thing you staged with the underage hooker and that financier," I said. "Oh yes, I saw that in the papers. I also saw that he'd been arrested at that place in Beaverton where you lived."

"I have a perfectly good alibi."

"I bet you do. What's going to happen to him? What if he walks?"

"He won't walk far. I have heard rumors that the pimp of that hooker is going to pop the guy who was with her when CPS showed up. It spoiled his income, and he's pissed."

I looked at her angry face. "You really have it in for these people."

"They killed my mother, and they've been trying to kill me. They believe that their enemies have to be physically destroyed. It's a religion and a drug to them, and they actually like killing people."

"That's sick."

She nodded. "They have all sorts of euphemisms for it. We know Stalin was a mass-murderer, but a lot of people don't believe Lenin was. He liked repression and killing just for the sake of it. These people are like that, Che Guevara for example.

"But enough about that sort of thing. Have you finished your paper for Western Civ?"

"Last night. What did you write about? The evils of socialism, I bet."

"No, that would be too easy. My paper is on the free interchange of ideas during the last three plagues. Fighting those plagues was humanity at its finest."

"Huh. I wouldn't have expected that of you."

"What did you think I'd do, put in an after word about how some people chose to resist sharing information, and suffered even more? That only happened in a few places, and those were isolated. It wasn't like polio, for crying out loud. That's when Seventh Century social and political beliefs kept a disease alive long after it should have been eradicated. No, I wanted something positive."

I was a little mollified. If I'd learned one thing in the last couple of months, it was that you did not discuss politics with Shannon. She could get politics out of anything, and when she did, she'd show you how somebody was being stupid, but for political gain. I'd doubted her at first, but one day in class she spent the entire hour citing chapter and verse, all from history, about the politics of some particular thing. Most of what she said didn't stick, but I'd read about Lysenko, and that did.

Jared and I discussed it one day. We were lying on the cot we'd brought into the lab. We'd just made love—not 'had sex'—and it was like our hearts were open to each other.

"She can't help it," Jared said. "That's the way she was raised."

"She seems so bitter about it."

"She didn't have a normal childhood. They even took her dolls away when she was six because they were distracting her from the struggle of the working class against the bankers."

"Her dolls!"

"She told me about some of the games they played. It was all politics, all of the time with the people around her. Those people killed her mother, that whole belief system killed her mother, and she's vowed to destroy it."