Chapter 306

"Hi Maxine, I did some checking on line at school today between classes. Why don't you stop by the tax office this morning and have a talk with your friends down there. I bet there is some leverage somewhere we can use to persuade the A1 people to sell that building." Sylvia suggested. The building's address was 210 Park Place which would have been more impressive had we been playing Monopoly. Unfortunately in our town Park Place was right in the middle of the downtown blighted area.

The real problem for me was that the courthouse had a metal detector on the entrance door. I was reasonably sure that the creator had some trick up his sleeve, but since I could not fly commercial maybe not. "Tell you what Sylvia, let me make some calls and I'll get back with you."

Even I knew that in spite of what I said about a steel frame, most of my body frame was made from non magnetic polymer parts. A fancy way of saying I was made of plastic, just like the frame of a Glock pistol. But of course not even a silicon based unit like me, as the geeks referred to us, can avoid all metal.

Okay, get me a geek on the line, I messaged to the controller. When I had a geek, I sent the following message. How do I beat the magnetometer?

You might want to go back to the basic introduction lecture to your body. You know the lecture you didn't have time for while you were at the facility, the message in my head said.

Come on guy, you know I'm not worth a shit at school. Not only that, I was busy trying to figure out how I was going to get fucked in this new body. It probably didn't record. I knew when I said it, that they would either laugh or be pissed beyond words.

You can not joke your way out of this. Are you sitting down somewhere? The geek du jour asked.

Yes of course, I replied.

I am going to send you the information on the evasion features of the roomba 9000 as we have begun to call you around here, so listen up bitch. I couldn't tell if the geek was joking, or if one of the controllers had come on line.

Please do, I need to go into the courthouse tomorrow, I messaged.

These will work on everything except TSA scanners and CIA headquarters type security. I am sending you a list of places that have those as well. There are no more than a dozen in the country outside of airports.

Suddenly the information just appeared in my mind. It had been buried in my circuits I am sure. but if I searched forever I might have never found it. There was a huge amount of shit in my circuits that I never looked at. I didn't even know how to find the help menu for my body.

I found the cloaking device would not work on the TSA airport scanners was because they were not just magnetometers, they were also body xray scans. I might get away with a full body hand search, but nobody thought they were a good idea. Sometimes they might be fun, but not if the agent noticed something wrong. Some of those guys were good at their jobs and very serious about security.

The way the magnetometer cloaking device worked was not explained. It obviously caused my body to put off some kind of signal that interfered with the magnetometer's detection equipment. I just knew that it reduced the magnetic signature of my body to that of a metal zipper on a pair of jeans. In other words it was absolutely minor. There were only a dozen places where that level would register.

Call first, if you plan to visit CIA headquarters or the Pentagon is all I can tell you, was the message which suddenly appeared in my brain.

"Well, if I have to go somewhere like that, I will opt for the full body search." I said aloud.

When I finally figured out how to activate the cloaking device, I returned Sylvia's call. "You want to ride down to the Tax office with me tomorrow. I decided to see how much distress that property is in. Maybe we can get a better deal." It wasn't the deal. I would have paid the few extra bucks, it was causing suspicion, if I didn't act right. Acting right, was running down every lead just like I would have done the year before.

We agreed to meet at my downtown house at noon. then to ride down to the tax office together. Sylvia and I both felt that the pressure was on to make it happen. Dead of winter was not the best time for construction work, so Delbert was anxious to get started. We knew this because he had called one or the other of us three times in the last two days.

We had all been waiting not so patiently for the owner of the building to come up with a sales figure. Since the A1 Check Cashing Service and Payday Loan company had gone out of business two months before, the local Realtor had been on hold.

Sylvia had just stumbled onto the building, because we were in a real hurry. Sylvia had also heard that it was my habit to wait until a seller was motivated, before I tried to purchase a piece of property. The A1 people had been out of town only a couple of months, so they might not realize how bad the outlook for a quick sale really was. She knew that it was likely they were not properly motivated. However if they were in financial trouble, I might be able to motivate them.

When we arrived at the metal detector I wasn't too concerned. Even if I failed to pass it, I had enough scars on my body to convince the security guards that it was metal pins and hinges. I didn't want to strip off, but I could certainly do it without any big loss of dignity. I wasn't all that dignified in the first place.

What I found interesting was that I had required a learning curve to know about the cloaking device and how to use it. I wondered why I didn't just know everything there was to know from day one. That was going to require some explaining. Were computers capable of learning and understanding not just storing facts, I wondered. Of course they were to some extent Watson had proved that on Jeopardy, as had Lucy and Eve before me. They learned things, but I never was sure how much they understood.