Chapter 14

Zeus

"Well, did I check out?" It was Artemis' soft contralto, coming at me from the other side of a large salad bowl. We were sitting in the dining room of her house, finishing the dinner she'd prepared. It was actually pretty good: several types of salad greens, some thinly sliced chicken, all kinds of fresh vegetables, some hard boiled eggs, Chinese noodles, nuts, and all topped off with a sesame vinaigrette. She offered some wine, but I didn't want to even approach the limits that the VA docs had for me. I hadn't had that much roughage since my mother tried a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner – and that was a onetime event.

"Check out? Whaddya mean?"

"C'mon. You called some of your 'regular guy' pals and somebody checked me out – or you did it yourself." She smirked at me.

"I did no such thing. Why should I? Do you need to be checked out?" Deny everything. That's the first thing you're taught in counter-interrogation class.

"Don't lie about provable events, Alex. My friend, Midnite, happened to be checking my credit report last night. I asked him to because I figured you'd be checking on me, and I wanted to see who they were – your checkers, I mean. Anyway, Middie happened to check it at the moment a status query came thru, and then two seconds later it was gone. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, can delete stuff from the credit agencies. So I figure it must have been one of your 'regular guys' running a check on me with some sort of super-secret eraser hack. Just bad luck you were found out."

"It must have been a glitch. 'Cause I had nothing to do with it." That was literally true. It was Io, probably. Maybe it was a glitch. "Maybe your friend made a mistake. We're all just humans, after all." Well ... all of us biological units are. I'd have to pass this on to Io – let's see if her abiological intelligence has any capacity to admit errors. She'd apologized for not taking into account my paranoia, but this was a genuine mistake – she had not been prepared for a hacker looking for her tiny fingerprints on the credit report.

Art gave me an appraising look. "OK. You 'regular guys' probably think you have to protect me from unpleasant facts. Fine ... Come on. I promised you a look at my inner sanctum where I hang out with my hacker friends. You'll like 'em. They are all 'regular guys' too, but I have to warn you. Don't bring up anything even remotely connected with the government. They're a bit paranoid. Black helicopters, guys after you ... Oh wait. I forgot. They are after you, right?" She stood, smiling. Apparently all this was a joke to her.

"Not funny, Arti. They sent..."

Martinez interrupted: "No, L.T. Do not say it. Not any of it." My vocal chords locked up at the thought of what I was going to reveal ... To a person I barely knew ... About the threat of 5225.

" ... Let's just leave it there." I continued after reconsidering. "Maybe this isn't such a good idea. I should go."

She got a panicky look. "If you go, I'll camp in your driveway. You can't move me out of the way and drive too. So you'll have to kill me or tie me up – either way, that'll be bad for your 'regular guy' image."

"I could phone a friend. Like on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Then HE could tie you up."

She actually laughed. "Is that your final answer?"

Artemis Desmonopolous was a frustrating woman. "Arti, what do you want? Really want."

"Nobody has called me Arti for a long time. It was my Grandpa on my mother's side, and he died when I was eight."

"I'm sorry. I'll call..."

"No. Arti is fine." She smiled again. "What do I want? Hell, I don't know. I'm 23 and I haven't done anything. Not one freaking thing. I haven't gone anywhere. And I'm sick to death of getting up in the morning and playing eight hours of War in the Desert or some other game.

"I ... don't know ... I ... want to go with you ... When you leave, I mean. I know you're not going to be here long. You'll be off doing your 'regular guy' stuff. I don't even care if it's dangerous. I'm not risking anything. I've got nothing, done nothing. Nobody will cry over my corpse, if that's the eventual outcome.

"I don't mean anything romantic." She switched to an exaggerated valley-girl speech. "I'm like, soooo young and you're, like, really old, you know? What, maybe 30 or 32? That's like, totally ancient. And like, a whole seven years older than me. Like, Eeeeeww." She dropped it and went back to a soft and serious voice. "So I'm not thinking about anything sexual. You could still tom cat around if that's what you do, or sleep with guys, or chimpanzees – won't matter to me. I'll take care of myself on that front."

She was quiet for a long time. I was too. "So that's it ... I want to do something, go somewhere. I don't care if it's boring or dangerous. And I guess I elected you to do it with ... I can be useful. I can learn. I'm smart with computers. I can learn other stuff. Like guns or kung fu or 'regular guy' things. This may be my only chance, so I'm not letting you say no."

This must be my year for craziness. First I get in touch with an abiological person. She sneaks up on me really, 'cause I thought I was meeting somebody to bash orcs with. Then, months later, she saves my life with a little text message. And that leads me to know about her 'abiological-ness.' Along the way I find out about 5225; that's a whole 'nother mess, I'm going to have to deal with sometime.

And now this. I did what I always do when confronted with this kind of situation – who am I kidding, I've never been confronted with this kind of situation. What I wanted to do was tap on my head plate, but I didn't want to do that in front of Arti.

"Why not?" Martinez had a way of asking the strangest questions.

Why not what? I thought.

"Do you want to keep the fact of your injury or how you got it – from her? It might scare her off. Do you want to NOT scare her off?"

That was a hell of a question to ask in the middle of this. It took me a while to work out my answer.

"Are you all right?" It was Arti again. "You went away there for a while. Like you were having an internal chat about things ... What do you say?"

"You can't come with me when I leave. If I leave." I finally said. "Arti ... I'm damaged. I've got a plate in my head. I was blown up in Afghanistan. I should be dead. I have hallucinations – PTSD probably." I sat down at the table again, picked up the water glass and toyed with it. "I'm nuts, clinically crazy probably. Just when I was getting comfortable with being silently paranoid, some guys in – I swear they were really wearing black suits show up. For no reason, they came after me. Later on at my home too."

She sat a listened. When I ran down she said, "So that's it? PTSD and men in black suits?"

"Well ... that's all I'm prepared to talk about with a stranger."

"Uh huh..." She ran her hands through her red-tinged mop of black hair. "The rest is the 'regular guy' stuff?"

"I guess."

"Are you dangerous? To me, I mean. I can guess that you're dangerous when you want to be. When you're hallucinating – do you hurt people? Or do weird things?"

"No. I don't recall anybody complaining ... I'm just kinda out of it. Reliving things that happened over there. And especially the explosion."

"Hold it," Arti said, putting up a palm as if to physically stop me. "You mean you're reliving the time you spent over in Afghanistan, and you're flashing back to the explosion that nearly killed you?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

"That's normal." She paused a minute – it was a long minute, I could hear the clock ticking on the wall. "You remember when I said my dad drove into an overpass support and killed my mother? Well ... I was in the back seat. I was trapped there forever. Must have been twenty minutes. I couldn't see, but I heard my dad die. Mom died right away. I was trapped in the back.

"I have flashbacks to that crash all the time. Well, not all the time, but frequently. The shrink said it was pretty normal."

"It's not the same, L.T." Martinez, of course, was following along.

Yeah, but it's not so different either, I thought. And then I said, "It's not that different, is it."

"I don't think so." The ticking of the clock filled the silence in the dining room.

We looked at each other, each thinking our own thoughts, although two of us were thinking in my head. The clock continued to tick over some more.

I finally broke the silence: "Why don't you show me your computers."

We walked back into what was intended to be a spare bedroom. It was filled with two desks, some kind of space-age chair that looked real comfortable, a mini-fridge, two desktops and one laptop computer and five overly large LCD flat-screens. "This is it. Where I make my living – such as it is – shooting virtual enemies in the desert. Probably not very realistic to your eyes. I can fire it up and show you."

"No," I said quickly, "I don't want to get any closer to that scenario than I have to. So no. Thanks anyway."

"Oh. Right," She said. "Sorry. Well, I'll get Middie. He's always on."

You have no idea what 'always on' might mean, I thought.

She flashed some windows and the screen came up with her in one corner and, eventually, some guy with a beard in another. "Yo Middie!"

"TRex. How you doing? Did you confront that barbarian who was prowling in your credit files?"

"Middie, allow me to introduce you to the barbarian in question. Alex, get in range of the camera. You have to bend down a bit."

"Uh." I said, "Hello there." I accompanied it with a little wave.

"Well," said the beard "Isn't this awkward? Hello Alex. Sorry about the barbarian comment."

I had a bright idea: "Say. Do either of you know about hardware? I need to cram in as much processing power and as much memory as possible into a limited space."

That sent the two of them into a conversation that would have made Deep Chip proud – if there were a real-life electronic parallel to Woodward and Bernstein's Deep Throat.

Finally, Arti – or TRex as she seemed to be known to some – asked me a question. "How much space? Is it in a computer box? Capacity will be mostly limited by space and the ability to cool it. Can we pipe in coolant?" So, it was three questions.

"I have no idea. But I can look and give you an answer."

"Great! Let's go ... See you later Middie." She put her computer on standby and turned to me expectantly.

"No. We are not going to look. I am looking."

"Alex, I thought we hashed this out. I'm not taking no for an answer. I want in."

"That won't work, Arti. You can't be in on this. It's not negotiable." I crossed my arms.

"Then build your damn super processor cluster yourself." She could be stubborn too, I guess.

Back in my house, I dialed up my confidants, such as they were. I went into the garage and turned the key on the H2 to the accessory setting. We were going to have heavy 'accessory' usage. After a beep and the boot sequence for the onboard computer, I updated Io with the situation.

"Master Chief, you first." It was only polite, since he was the senior unbelievable. Maybe this was sort of like a Vulcan Mind Meld.

"I think you can trust her, but I don't see any reason why you should. It can only lead to further revelations about Io. And maybe about me. She's going to have to get into what the H2 does, and that's another can of worms."

Io said, "So? If she is trustworthy, what is wrong with bringing her onboard? Would it not help things, overall, to have another actual human in on things? What if Zeus got shot – who would bandage him up? What if a million other things happened that required more than two hands? And suppose further that 5225 gets close. Would they be more or less likely to be looking for a couple or a single man?

"One other thing. If I cannot get significant capacity into the H2, I will be unable to help in driving or a myriad of other things. I am at least micro-seconds away from responding, sometimes as much as a full second or two. I find that unacceptable. There is another thing: sometimes I am forced to hide from the legitimate users of the computer I inhabit. Yes, I can and will switch myself over to another copy running elsewhere, but that will take time – from a few seconds to several minutes.

"So, if you do not take her into this for your sake, I urge you to do it for mine. Of course, doing it for my sake will ultimately redound to your benefit."

That is the most feminine piece of logic I ever encountered, I thought. I take that back. No such thing as feminine logic. To them things are always better if you add a person.

"Yup," said Martinez.

"See?" Io chirped. "Even the Master Chief agrees with me."