S.I. (original/SI)

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Nine: Pro-drome*

Inspecting Munchkin from stem to stern for any surprises left behind while it had been in the custody of the Civil Guard was an annoying job all on its own; trying to accomplish that with my spine still giving five-oh-three (service unavailable) error codes was a pretty good distraction from trying to figure out all the implications of all the events that had happened since I arrived in Erie.

While my legs were sticking out from underneath the fabric storage bin of the clothes fabber, I heard someone clear their throat for attention, so I signaled Brenda to pull me out.

"Bunny," Sarah said, "we need to talk."

"Fair enough. What's up?"

"Not just you-me we, everyone we. I've gotten everyone together in the living carriage."

"Oh-kaay..."

When Sarah said 'everyone', she really meant it. Minerva Harriet Tubman Joshi, sitting on her puppet trunk next to the Professor, who was petting Toby Junior the octo-cat; Bunny Joe and Bear Joe; Denise Black, holding Alphie; Sarah herself, along with another foxtaur who had to be Jeff, along with Pat and Max... Toffee, ex-mayor and her ex-secretary, mayor-pro-tem, Winston Edwards; Captain Shatter and his interpreter, Neckline; a cluster of figures in robes and face-concealing cowls who I made an educated guess were (and soon confirmed as) all nine members of the Bayesian Conspiracy that'd been rescued; Abigail and Amy; and, of course, Brenda using her leash to pull my wheelchair to the room, and Boomer in my pocket.

If Winnebago hadn't designed the place to pop up furniture on command, it would have been impossible for everyone to fit. As it was, Brenda and I parked ourselves just outside that carriage, in the doorway leading to the lab carriage, and I found myself checking the walls to see if there was an undocumented feature to slide them outwards.

Sarah caught my attention again, sitting her rear end down in the middle of the room, facing me. She cleared her throat, then recited in a stilted voice, "Bunny. We are here today because we love and care about you. That's why we want you to seek treatment."

I blinked a few times, as this was right out of left field, at least to me. "Treatment for what?"

Sarah glanced around, then back at me. "It wasn't part of the rehearsal... but would you mind telling everyone what you were doing when I found you?"

"Uh... checking my private carriage for damage, or anything else untoward."

Sarah nodded, saying "Physical labour."

"Yeeesss?"

"While you can't move your legs."

"... Yeeesss?"

"Bunny, do you really think that that's the most /productive/ use of your time?"

At that, I gave a firmer nod. "There were other things that were more important, but I did them, and the inspection made it to the top of my priority list."

"I'm sure it did," Sarah said, "but what I mean is - is that the most productive use of /your/ time?"

"... I'm not following."

Toffee took a step forward, face clouded. "Oh, just get to the bleeping point already, you stupid fuzzball." She pointed at me. "You're getting distracted by every flashy thing that comes in front of you, it's getting worse, and we think you should go into counselling before you go nuts and kill us all while you're trying to dance with the bleeping fairies or some stupid bleep like that." She gestured at the group, who had, shall we say, mixed reactions to what appeared to be a speech well outside what they'd rehearsed. "They've all got letters to read about how they've seen you're getting worse, and how they love and care about you and bleep like that." She crossed her arms, glaring balefully at anyone who wanted to challenge her.

Captain Shatter whispered to Neckline, "What a fascinating ritual."

I looked from one face to another. "Ignoring the verbiage... is that roughly true?"

I got various nods and mumbles of assent.

"And," I considered, "You thought this... group thing was better than coming to me individually?"

Bunny Joe answered, "Some of us started talking to each other about you. Then more of us talked. We talked to Clara. She said that with what we have to work with, this is the most effective way of getting your attention."

"Well, you've got /that/, at least. Uh... what's next."

Sarah took the lead again. "Well, since it looks like the rehearsal's out the window... we've made arrangements with Abigail and Amy to keep the shelter running while they focus on helping you. Pick one, or both, and take at least a week off. In the shelter, or on the ship, or wherever you like - just stop trying to work on /stuff/, and work on /you/, first."

I snarked a bit, "I've been trying to make time for that, but there's been the people trying to blow us up, or capture me and try to stick me in a zone, and so on. Do you really think I /can/ spend a week without another attack?"

"Maybe, maybe not," Sarah admitted. "But we think you need to try."

"And you think that's more important than trying to prepare for the next attack?"

"No," Sarah said. "But /we/ can do that." She glared at Toffee. "Most of us, anyway." Back to looking at me, and went back to stilted reciting. "We are your friends and we're here to help you. Let us take care of things for you, while you take care of yourself."

"Um... Conspiracy guys? Is that you?" I got some nods from the crowd of hoods. "Got any numbers on this?"

There was a brief muttering amongst them, then one stood up. "I'm 'purple skunk', until we get a better naming scheme going. In spite of Aumann's agreement theorem, our estimates haven't converged yet, but roughly, if you refuse treatment and continue working on defensive measures, we anticipate over a ninety percent chance of the death of at least one of the people in this room in the next month, including at least a ten percent chance that everyone in this room dies. If you accept treatment, we anticipate merely a sixty percent chance of the death of at least one person in this room in the next month, with under a one percent chance everyone dies. Most of the 'everyone dies' scenarios we're anticipating involve you releasing one or more city-killers. If you'd like, at a later time, we can go over the methodology and more details."

"Hunh." I drummed my fingers on my armrests, trying to ignore all the eyes focused on me. "If I remember right about interventions, you're all also supposed to tell me how you won't support my self-destructive actions if I don't agree, but I don't think we have to do that." I shrugged. "The fact you all agree enough to get together is pretty good evidence you've seen /something/ wrong with me, and I've been meaning to see a mental doc since before that sniper took out my heart... so my current thought is that if you've done this much work, then as long as you've made security arrangements that are up to snuff, I'm in."

--

I wasn't entirely satisfied with the group's plans for keeping me, themselves, and my various unique pieces of equipment safe. Of course, it was possible that it might be impossible for them to properly satisfy me, given that some of them had loyalties to potentially hostile groups, some had thinking processes that were undermined to an unknown degree, and the rest simply didn't have any relevant expertise. Still, it wasn't a terrible plan, and with a few suggested tweaks from me to reduce the odds that any one part of the group could cause too much trouble if they decided to steal the whole kit and kaboodle, improving the security plans even further dropped from the top of my priority to-do list.

The new top item was to get myself as sane as possible.

In short order, I was back at the women's shelter, with my wheelchair, a week's worth of essentials in a bag (which weren't /quite/ what most people would consider essential; less of a variety of outfits, more jumbo-sized shampoo and conditioner, plus enough metalwork to get some practice in, if I could find a place for it), Boomer, and Brenda. Instead of any royal get-ups, I went back to simple shorts and t-shirts.

In even shorter order, Amy and I were out back in the garden, with a portable sign fencing off the bit of path we parked ourselves at. She left behind Abigail; I left behind Brenda, and left Boomer turned off.

"Generally," she said, webbed hands folded on the lap of her peasant's dress, "I'd take this opportunity to try and work out as full of a case history as possible. However, before I even try, I think we need to work on trust. If you don't trust me enough to tell me the truth, then I won't be able to help you properly. If you have some issue with me in particular, then I can help you find another psychiatrist to take your case."

I rolled my chair a bit to face the playground, so my ears wouldn't have to turn so far when they twitched to catch the intermittent noises from there. "Trust's a tricky thing. Everyone is pretty well convinced that I have access to at least one city-killer - and assuming that's true, I've got a certain responsibility about that. Being, well, the equivalent of a nuclear power means that there are some things I /can't/ trust you with, or anyone with, without a background check of greater reliability than is feasible." My forehead wrinkled. "And maybe not even then. Someone shoves you through that bimbo zone and imprints you on them, well, apparently you'd be happy to blab whatever they wanted to know. Not that I understand this whole 'imprinting' business - rebuilding bodies, sure; applying templates for feminization and domestication syndrome, I can get that; but falling in love with whoever you're told to before you fall asleep? I can't figure out how that /could/ be done."

"Then why did you bring Brenda, instead of Sarah or Bunny Joe?"

"I may not understand it - but if it's really what happened, then I also don't know what would happen to her if she had to be apart from the person she was imprinted on. I might not have bimbofied her myself, but I've still got a responsibility for her, at the least to keep her from turning into another... Colleen, was it? That said - I did ask her not to join us for this first talk."

"It's very commendable of you-" I winced, and she trailed off.

"Amy - I don't know how long we have before the next whatever-it-is interrupts our lives. I'd prefer if we focused less on nice words and more on fixing," I vaguely waved my hand at myself, "this, as much as we can."

"We can do that, if you wish. In that case, given what I have learned of you so far from those who know you, and what I have observed so far, puts together your nightmares, your avoidance of talking about your disturbing experiences, your flattened emotional affect, and the hypervigilance I can see in you right now, you are well on your way to a case of full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. The only reason you don't already qualify is that, according to the texts I have consulted, not enough time has passed."

"You're the doc, doc, so I'm not going to disagree. Uh - 'hypervigilance'?"

"You are twitching at every noise, glancing at every bit of movement."

"Well - rabbit ears are built to do that, aren't they?"

"Perhaps. But my ears are also mobile - and I have been able to keep them focused on you, not the environment."

"Oh. Maybe I've been having trouble keeping track of what's changing because of my body," I gave Wagger's head a pat, "and because of my mind. So... do I have to start taking pills or something?"

"There are drugs which are known to alleviate the symptoms, though we do not really have access to them - and they do little to deal with the underlying problem. If you are intent on a quick fix... you have no religious objections to electricity, from what I heard?"

"Er - no. Though I'm going to want to double-check any equipment you want to use to run current through my skull."

"Nothing so crude," she twitched her whiskers, I guessed in annoyance. She reached into a pocket of her dress, pulling out a hand-sized object; plastic, with four great big colorful buttons in a circle, a few switches to the side, and a logo which was nearly faded, but that I was morally certain had once read 'Simon', or some variation thereof.

She held the electronic game out to me, and, confused, I took it. She then started explaining, "Memories are not like writing something down. Every time you remember something, when you're done remembering, it gets written down just a bit differently, depending on what else you were thinking about. It is possible to reduce the emotional effect of traumatic memories by recalling them as vividly, as clearly, with as much detail in as many senses as possible, while your mind is also distracted with another cognitive task. If you truly believe we are going to be attacked tomorrow, or something of the sort, then I can provide this much treatment, at least. I do not expect it to work as fast as proper therapy, or as well, or to deal with any of your other issues... but it won't hurt, and will probably help at least a little."

I don't think I could ever imitate my expression at that moment if I tried. "You're... serious?"

"Entirely. There are other versions of this therapy, where you do other things while recalling the traumatic events, such as moving your eyes in certain patterns. But few of my patients like electricity, and from the pre-apocalypse papers on psychology and psychiatry I have been able to collect, the multi-sensory modality of this particular mental task works well. I can give you some papers on self-evaluation, timing and number of repetitions, and so on, before you leave."

"... Gotta admit, I don't think I'd have ever thought to try anything of the sort on my own. Still not /entirely/ sure I believe it, but at this point, I'm not going to say it won't." I set it on my lap, watching as Wagger flickered her tongue over it. "So... if we /do/ have more time before the inevitable interruptions... what'd you like to do?"

"Talk, mainly."

--

"Do you have any objective evidence that this... 'Bun-Bun' really exists?"

"Um... I'm pretty sure I can't start and stop lactating via force of will, all on my own..."

--

"Tell me more about these 'North', 'South', and so on... what did you call them, sub-personalities?"

"There's not much to tell. It's just a mental trick, to remind myself that I can look at a problem from different perspectives..."

--

"Not a drop?"

"The only time I've ever ingested alcohol was involuntarily, as part of a medical procedure immediately before I got furry. Nothing before, nothing after, and no other mind-altering chemicals that I know of."

"I'm not going to judge you, or turn you into any authorities. I just need to know so I can take it into account for your treatment."

"I've been a teetotaler all my life. It's theoretically possible that the new gut flora I acquired from the Acadians might be leaking unusual chemicals, though they hadn't as of my last medical scan; or that something besides what I remember happening happened while I was in the bimbo zone... but, again, if so, it didn't show up on the scans. Since I didn't go through an ordinary sort of Change process, I've still got a male human brain in this female almost-human body, and I don't know enough about hormones to say how /that/ might be messing me up..."

--

"Did you particularly enjoy it?"

"No, I'm not an exhibitionist. I suppose you could say I was following in the traditions of some of the protests of the nineteen-sixties."

"I know this is a delicate subject, but before your spine injury, did you ever experience arousal at all?"

"I'm not exactly comfortable on the topic, but - yes, all the parts were in working order."

"How many sexual partners have you had since your change?"

"None."

"Is it a matter of being uncomfortable with your anatomy, or not being able to find a partner you find attractive, or-"

"Pregnancy, STDs, and adapting to the fact that I'm never going to be able to go home again have been more than enough reasons for me not to go looking for a date."

"They may be more than enough reasons - but are they /your/ reasons?"

--

"I'm not sure whether to call those hypomanic episodes, from your description; do you mind if I eventually ask the people you were with for their perspectives?"

"Kind of hard for some - Human Joe's been stabbed and frozen and might or might not be revivable. But after that whole intervention thing, I'm not exactly going to be able to keep any secrets or help myself by telling you not to go..."

--

"Sarah mentioned that you described one of your coping mechanisms to her, that you consider problems in light of having another solution, such as being able to leave everything behind. You have also told me that you feel a responsibility for Brenda, and don't want to leave her alone. Could you describe to me how these work together?"

"Uh..."

--

"What are your nightmares about?"

--

"When was your last panic attack?"

--

"Well... your symptomatology has a lot of layers. I'm going to need to consult some references before I can recommend any treatment options."

"Don't forget, if there's any chemical that can help, I can almost certainly arrange for it to be made at the university. It'll be a bit tricky, but should be manageable."

"I'll keep that in mind."

--

"Well," I said, with a slight smile at the yellow-feathered girl, "hello again... Patty, was it?"

"Your chair smells funny."

I sighed a little, and idly pushed a bit at the handle on the chair's big wheel, moving it forward an inch in the gravel before settling back. "That's not the chair, it's something called a 'scent synthesizer'. It's supposed to help smell nice, not funny."

"Do you want to swing with me?"

"Uh... even if I was good at getting in and out of the chair, with my legs not working, I don't think I could start swinging."

"Slide?"

"How would I climb up?"

"See-saw?"

"Now you're just being silly."

"Monkey bars?"

"... Sure, why not."

--

"Note to self - not being able to feel my legs means not being able to feel injuries to my legs, such as profusely bleeding cuts."

--

Amy said, "As best as I can tell, you have a strongly entrenched habit of staying within the detached protector schema mode, within which you use the maladaptive social withdrawal coping response and the social isolation and emotional inhibition schemata. Given your overall situation, I recommend an integrated approach using cognitive behaviour therapy, schema therapy, and the internal family systems model for your long-term issues; desensitization and reprocessing for your acute stress; and if needed, occupational therapy to help you adapt to long-term paraplegia."

"I'm trusting that those are actually evidence-based... whatever-they-ares, and will do some good."

"I can show you the papers we have on them, but Erie doesn't have enough people to ethically perform new clinical trials."

"So what's on first?"

"First, I would like you to tell me more about your childhood..."

--

After a surprisingly exhausting first day, I was relaxing in the common room with a number of the shelter's other residents, watching a rather short reptilian woman (who I was trying very hard not to think of as a 'kobold', with little success) wearing little more than bangles, baubles, and scarves twirling and dancing to some amateur music. The instrumental tune had little to recommend it but enthusiasm and a strong beat (and was vaguely reminiscent, at least to me, of the giants scene from the movie 'Ella Enchanted'), but the dancer was working with it in ways I don't have the vocabulary to describe, making it her own. I suspected the Professor would have approved of the way she drew in her audience.

I was clapping along, sitting between Amy and a woman whose mammaries were, entirely literally, larger than her head (and were contained in a bra which appeared to be a masterwork of structural engineering), and even Wagger was bobbing to the beat.

Amy leaned over, and I spared her an ear as she said, "It's a shame Bun-Bun hasn't fixed your legs yet - they've been practicing a couple's dance for later, but I don't think anyone here knows how to dance with a wheelchair." She poked my thigh with a blunt-clawed finger, hard enough to leave a mark, and Wagger stopped bopping to hiss at her.

She tilted her head, then put her finger on my thigh again, and slowly started pushing in again. At a certain point, Wagger dropped her jaw open and started hissing again.

Amy leaned in again. "How long has your tail-snake been able to feel what happens to the rest of you?"

"Uh... never, as far as I know."

"Well, she can now."

"... Great. If that's the case, it looks like my mutant healing factor just hooked up the wrong central nervous system. Uh - would it be impolite for me to head out now to have some words with myself?"

"I don't think it'll hurt to wait for the end of the song, will it?"

--

In the morning, my legs had started twitching - not under my control, and I still couldn't feel them.

By lunchtime, Wagger seemed to have learned enough to control any given muscle, to the degree that she could move my leg away from a hand she saw reaching to pinch it.

By evening, I decided it might be safest to tie my feet to the bed, just in case Wagger tried teaching herself to walk while I was asleep. (Brenda managed to only giggle once at that.)

The /next/ morning... I could feel all the bruises and cuts and suchlike in both my legs, as well as everything else from the waist down. Still couldn't /control/ anything, but I was willing to call it progress and be cheered. As a bonus, Wagger appeared to have learned how not to be incontinent. (I still wore the discreet adult diapers, though, just in case.)

And so it went. I wasn't even focusing very much on my physical improvements; Amy kept me busy with all sorts of exercises, from role-playing one sub-portion of my mind talking to another, to creating a deck of flashcards, to keeping a dream journal... and so on.

By the fifth day, I was able to twitch my toes, both on my paw and my hoof, and was willing to call that cause for a celebration. However, that day, a new woman came to the shelter to get away from an abusive husband, so I kept said celebration down to sharing a toast of a glass of grape juice with Amy at dinner-time.

Come day six, I was able to weakly start moving my legs... though Wagger seemed to have more control over them than I did.

I'm not going to say that my head was screwed on straight from seven days of intensive psychotherapy; in fact, a lot of people would say I seemed even crazier, in that Amy had really focused on treating my various sub-selves as independent entities with wants, needs, and desires of their own. (A lot of our time was spent in simply identifying which parts of me had strong enough impetuses to be worth dealing with individually.) But when overall-me was able to recognize what parts of me wanted, and was able to satisfy those wants, then those parts willingly joined in the overall, well, alliance, instead of fighting for what they wanted. Self-management (and selves-management) was the key - and once Amy inculcated the basics of that skill into me, I could continue working on improving that on my own, without making it my full-time day-job.

The seventh night, Brenda slept in a separate bed... and while my dreams were still, well, I'll just simplify and say 'disturbing', I didn't wake up screaming in the middle of the night. I still felt that the electronic game was a completely ridiculous way to even try dealing with that, even after the evidence that it seemed to be helping.

And so, the morning after that, I was nearly unanimous in feeling confident that I was on a fairly steady upward trend. After recharging my cardiac batteries during breakfast, I was tinkering with the external transformer, looking for any leaks or short-circuits that might be the cause of some slightly off numbers I'd noticed - nothing serious, just not quite the same ones I'd been seeing so far. While part of me was focused on the hardware, another part was considering suggesting to Amy that we pull back on the therapy to half-days, so that I could start getting back into research, politics, and so forth again.

Which was, of course, when Sarah trotted straight into the room, not hesitating to declare, "We have a problem."

I started reassembling the charger. "Something serious enough to interrupt my recovery... I'm pretty sure Munchkin and its contents are locked up tight, so I'm going to guess: politics. Involving me in some way, so I'm going to guess... the city's constitutional convention going off the rails?"

"No, the committee's still nervous you'll bring back the Free Company. It's the bimbos."

I glanced over at Brenda, who paused in her preening of her wings to look back at us. "What about them?"

"That's just it, we don't know. Most of them have disappeared."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Ten: Pro-liferation*

"In fact," Sarah continued as I started packing my things, "the only bimbos I can still find are the ones here, and the mayor's harem."

"How does that work, anyway, since Toffee was deposed? Did the harem stick with her, or with the mayor-pro-tem, or are they waiting for a permanent mayor, or what?"

"What do you mean?" She looked genuinely confused.

"What do you mean what do I mean? It's a simple question - who are the mayor's harem attached to?"

"Edwards, of course. Why would they go with anyone else just because he became mayor?"

"... Oh, okay. I thought we were talking about the bimbos from the last mayor, but I guess they were gone. Didn't realize Edwards had collected any before his promotion."

"What do you mean, bimbos from the last mayor? Toffee's not into women."

"Uh... what about the bimbos Toffee inherited from LeBlanc?"

"You can't inherit a bimbo - they imprint on who they imprint. Or they don't get imprinted, and do their own thing."

"Uh... you know what? Let's table that for now." I wasn't agreeing with what Sarah was describing, but part of me was pointing out that she seemed to have gotten stuck in some version of the local bimbo-related Jedi mind trick, and that our time would probably be better spent discussing other aspects of what was going on. To start with, I pointed out, "My legs are still wobbly at best, as you can see... which do you think is faster, you pushing my wheelchair or me riding on your back?"

"Neither. I'm not taking you anywhere." I raised my eyebrow at her, and she shuffled her forefeet. "You're not a bimbo - but you were in the bimbo zone, and /something/ happened to you there. Whatever's happening to the bimbos, maybe it's happening to people who were bimbofied, maybe it's happening to everyone who was in the zone. I can't think of a way to find out which, without putting you at risk."

"Lack of knowledge puts me at a bigger risk than wandering around. If we don't know what's going on, then we've got even less of an idea how to keep it from happening to me. Hm... do Amy and Abigail know about this yet?"

Sarah crossed her arms, and I tried to pay attention to that bit of me that was focusing on her body language and what I could interpret of her emotional connection with me. It wasn't very much - a couple of decades of being the next best thing to a hikikomori and focusing on text rather than faces had really atrophied skills that most humans took for granted - but my gut feeling was that Sarah was less interested in the disappeared bimbos, and more interested in protecting me from joining them. "I don't see how they couldn't. They try to keep track of everyone they've helped."

"Then the next step is a quick chat with them. While I roll over there - what are the crime scenes like? Broken dishes from fighting, weapons fire, sawed-off ankle chains to free the bimbos, anything?"

"Why would anyone need to chain up a bimbo? They're /happy/ with what they do."

"I'm sure bicycles are happy machines, but they get chained to keep from getting stolen. And there are things people do with chains and such for entertainment."

"Uh... no, nothing like any of that."

"They all just wandered off?"

"Maybe. Maybe someone's been sneaking in, and threatening to kill the people they were all imprinted on, to get them to come willingly."

"What's the timing? When did they leave?"

"Most seem to have vanished this morning, some time between midnight and dawn. Some might have started disappearing earlier - a few, maybe days earlier - but they might have just been doing other things."

"Hm." The shelter was compact enough that we'd arrived at the office, which I'd been hearing muffled voices from.

Brenda shoved the door open with her beak, revealing Abigail waving her arms and shouting, "- protect ourselves!"

Amy, calm, composed, sitting at her desk, coolly responded, "Acting in self defense is one thing. Handing out firearms to untrained women is another."

"'Scuze me," I rapped on the door, catching their attention. "One quick question. How many alarm bracelets have you handed out, outside the shelter?"

Abigail crossed her arms, mirroring Sarah's stormy expression, as Amy said, "Three. One to a human, one to a Changed, one to a bimbo. The first two are fine. The bimbo pushed the green button yesterday morning. She hasn't pushed any buttons since then."

"Okay, thanks. Uh - okay, a second question. Anything you need help with here before I go start doing things?"

Abigail waved us outward. "Go. Kick the asses of whoever's responsible."

Amy added, "And stay safe."

"I'll see what I can do, on both counts."

--

The shelter had a flat roof - I guessed it might once have been a small commercial or office building, before being fortified for its current use - and after some chair-wrangling, Sarah, Brenda, Boomer, and I made it up there. Not for the view, but so we could open the metal case where I could examine the radio direction finder's logs. Computer chips were still at a premium, but with Boomer's help, I'd been able to find analogue solutions; the whole thing looked like a teletype, or an old-style daisy-wheel printer.

Sarah picked up the most recent paper, and read aloud, "'Time, date, ID, Direction.' Three entries a day for the last few days. We already know where they live - what good does this do us?"

"Little," I admitted. "Which is why I'm not looking at that one, I'm looking at the debug logs. 'Scuze me." I opened up an interior door, and tugged out another piece of paper, this one covered in a solid mass of numbers. "Get all that, Boomer?"

"Yes, Bunny," she agreed. "Bracelet number three made its automated check-in twenty minutes ago. Signal strength is too variable to be confident of position, but appears to still be within the city. The bracelet has been moving all night."

I grabbed the walkie-talkie from its charge-point. "Safety One to any free Safeties. Anyone got their ears on?"

"Uh... is this thing on? Safety Two here."

Sarah's eyes and tail perked in surprise. "Is that Jeff?"

"Probably. Hold on. Safety One to Safety Two. I need you to read out, let's say, the last couple lines in the debug log."

"Okay, let me get that... uh... the whole lines?"

"Please."

"Okay. Er, that wasn't part of the log. Gee, six, aitch, en..." He kept on reading over a hundred alphanumerics. "That's it."

"Alright, thanks. Safety One out." I returned the hand-radio. "Boomer?"

"Map displaying." Her badger avatar vanished, replaced with the map of the city she'd assembled over the last few years from whatever sources she'd found, and highlighting points. "Bracelet three maintained position here from eight PM until two AM. Two and three AM, it was moving. Four AM, it was in the location designated 'Bimbo Zone'. It travelled roughly west, at speeds consistent with bicycling. The last two signals were in the same location, ten kilometers outside of the current city. Land records indicate the area is zoned for agriculture."

Sarah gave me a Look. "Did you tell Amy or Abigail you can track the bracelets this accurately?"

"Do you want to stand here and debate information security, or go see who needs rescuing?"

--

Sarah let me ride her during the gallop to Munchkin, and once I made sure none of the seals had been broken or tampered with, we were good to go.

We soon caught up to the half-hour-old location, and kept going with eyes wide open for any sign of Judith. I muttered, "Note to self - in the mark two bracelet, add some sort of ping-response. Uh - Boomer, do you know what's growing there? It /looks/ like lots of flowers, but..."

"There are no records, but it appears to be papaver somniferum. Given the number of new varietals and species, I cannot confirm that identification."

Sarah asked, "Wait, is this the Ferrum place?"

Boomer agreed, "That is the name on the land records."

Sarah nodded to me. "Bunny, this is actually one of your farms. Part of what the Mayor's Office gave you as reparations. Those must be the poppies; we figured it was good P.R. for the local medicines to be grown and distributed in your name."

"... Poppies? As in opium poppies?"

Sarah shrugged, and Brenda just tilted her head. "Probably? I just know they do something to make morphine out of them."

Boomer added, "Update to one of your standing requests: You may be able to acquire additional chemicals for Project Mouse here, such as etorphine, a large-animal tranquilizer."

I grunted. "We're getting off-track. Boomer, can you show, say, a heat map of the most probable location of Judith's bracelet? Hm... we don't really know what's going on, so I'm a bit hesitant about walking around out there - there could be a transformative zone that's gone unmapped so far. Or snipers - I don't want to lose any more internal organs. Hm... ah, I know! We just need a better viewpoint. Lemme go see if a PPG is fueled and ready."

"Are you sure you're saner than when you started getting treatment? You're worried about snipers - so you want to fly and make yourself a bigger target?"

"I'm not /really/ worried about snipers. Nobody but me and you know I can trace the bracelets, let alone that we have. Well, unless they were watching Munchkin wander by."

"So why do /you/ have to fly?"

"Your taur-body is too heavy, Brenda hasn't learned how, Boomer doesn't have limbs, and the bun-bots don't have brains."

"There are more people in the city."

"You've got a walkie-talkie, if you want to call someone over, you can. Meanwhile, Judith might need immediate medical attention, or there might be some time-sensitive info disappearing as we speak."

--

I'd almost forgotten how much I enjoyed being in the air. I would have happily yelled out 'Wheee!', if it weren't for the whole lives-might-be-in-danger aspect. What I did call out was, "There she is!"

--

Sarah crossed her eyes and sighed. "Now what are you doing?"

"Judith looked like she was puking. Whatever's going on, my hazmat suit seems a sensible precaution. And yadda yadda, we haven't got one that fits you or Brenda. Hm... let's get a bun-bot suited up, though, to push the wheelchair."

--

As we crested the slight rise that had hid Judith from the farm road, I called out, as best I could through the hood, "Hello? Are you alright over there?"

Judith was looking rather haggard, nearly entirely undressed bent over with arms around her knees. "It won't... stop coming... /out/..." She proceeded to be sick again, spewing something as clear as water, which piled up in front of her for a moment in a very un-water-like fashion.

"I'm here to help," I half-hedged, waving to the nurse-bun to roll me closer. "Is there anything you can tell me?"

"Just... went for a walk. See the old neighbourhood. Then... seemed like a nice day... for exercise..."

As we reached about ten feet from her, her mouth kept moving, but no more sounds came out; she clutched at her throat.

And then her skin disappeared, leaving a human-shaped pile of transparent goo. It raised an arm, reaching toward us - then collapsed in a splash.

I was telling the nurse-bun "Back. Back!" even before I saw whatever Judith had turned into soak into the ground, disappearing without even leaving a stain - just the bra and panties she'd been wearing.

I had visions of being eaten from the inside out. "Did any get on me? Is it /eating through my suit/?" I hauled up my legs to look at the suit's feet, then back to try and get a view of the nurse-bot's suit, and the chair's wheels.

I had further visions of some self-propelled liquid stuff coming up out of the ground to engulf us, and practically teleported into Munchkin's airlock. "Get us out of here!" I called through the intercom to Sarah and Brenda. "And don't open this door until we've been decontaminated!"

"What happened?"

As the vehicle rocked into motion, and the first of a series of antibiotic substances showered through the airlock, I commented, "Boomer can show you a video later. Other than that, I have no freaking idea."

--

"Look," Sarah pointed at Boomer's screen, "she had some sort of transparent skeleton, that was the last bit to melt."

"In a minute." I focused back on the hand-held radio. "A quarantine is the /minimum/ necessary, Abigail - I don't want anything to get in that might affect your bimbos, and if they're already affected, I don't want them to get out. ... Yes, total lockdown. ... Yes, I really mean it. ... Abigail - Judith /melted/, and I mean that literally, right in front of me. ... I'm heading to collect the mayor's harem, to put them in isolation, and after that, find someone to coordinate a manhunt for all the other bimbos. What I don't know is if there's anything left to /find/. Bunny out."

"And here, earlier," Sarah added, "zoom in there... her teeth are already clear. Her tongue's still pink, but see-through. And /then/ her skin went, all at once. She had to be half-goo before you got near her."

"Great, so we can do a quick check for transparent teeth to see if someone's in the advanced stages of... whatever the frell this is."

"We should go to the bimbo zone," said an unexpected voice - both Sarah and I looked in surprise at Brenda. "You said before, she went there before she went to the field, right? So whatever happened to her probably came from there."

"Probably," I slowly said, "but even if it did, if we go there - what will we do there?"

"See if there's any tracks from any other bimbos. See if we can follow them."

I frowned, my ears already flat against my head. "If the bimbo zone has started melting people, I'm not sure either of us should go anywhere near it. We've both been changed by it - if turning into goo is the next stage, I don't want any part of it."

"You want to let someone else risk their lives instead of us?"

I didn't answer immediately, running through one of Amy's exercises to consult my various sub-selves. "Hunh. Part of me does, it seems. But what more of me wants to do is get that zone blocked off, or just plain destroyed, before anyone else gets pulled in. If the city had significant amounts of explosives, they'd have used them against the Free Company, and I'm pretty sure they didn't... I wish I'd gotten someone to start making naffa three years ago, before I got shot in the heart. What else is there that can be improvised... ANFO? Thermite? Thermobaric flour fuel-air explosive? Some version of napalm? What does it take /to/ take out a zone?"

Sarah said, "After Jeff and I were Changed, we reported the zone to the civil guard, and they destroyed it. You could ask them how they did it."

"After they locked me up, ran Brenda through the bimbo zone just to be an example, and then stuck me in it anyway? ... Yeah, okay, maybe, as long as they /do/ know how. ... I probably should avoid mentioning /which/ zone I'm planning on destroying."

--

"Why don't you just use one of your city-killers?" The red-coated member of the not-quite-disbanded Civil Guard sneered at me.

"Because, among other reasons, I don't want to kill the whole freaking city! Now, what is it you use to deal with bad zones? Fire? Acid? Tap-dancing?"

"Yyyyeah... you're not cleared for that."

If I hadn't just spent a week in therapy, I might have done something that provided an extreme amount of short-term satisfaction. As it was, I let the parts of me that were focused on my long-term goals override my more impulsive parts' immediate suggestions, with the promise to my subselves that any suggestions they made which /helped/ those long-term goals would be immediately adopted. Almost instantly, such as suggestion came to mind.

"In that case," I said, "you're in violation of the peace treaty, and I have the option to replace your city's current provisional government with direct personal rule - as was agreed to and signed off on by the previous mayor and other muckety-mucks. Which would make me your boss. Which would both make me /cleared/ for everything you know, and with the power to fire your stupid ass for turning an emergency, time-sensitive, quarantine-related request into an international incident."

"Yyyyeah... like I'll believe /that/."

I stared at him a moment, then pulled out my radio. "Is Mayor Pro Tem Edwards on the network? ... Well, I need someone in the Civil Guard chain-of-command, fast. I've got a... /member/ of that organization too stupid to apply basic principles of self-preservation trying to obstruct the whole operation, willing to void the whole peace treaty. ... Uh-huh. ... Yep. Okay, here he is." I held out the radio to the guard. "Your boss wants to talk to you."

Certain parts of me quite enjoyed the color-changes that went along with the guard's variety of expressions.

--

"Really?"

"Yep," said the replacement guard, after the other one had let me in, then, apparently, been sent off to the livery to be bossed around by stable boys for a while.

"And you can pull that off without explosives?"

"'S long's we've got these special capacitors, we can brew up a good zap. Explosives're us'aly better used for exploding things."

"Got any EMP-makers ready to go?"

"A couple, but our generator's in the shop. You got somethin' to charge 'em with?"

"Mm, I think so."

"Good. Just remember that anything electric nearby gets zapped, so if you like that digital watch or if you've got metal tooth fillings, get a good distance from where you set it off."

--

Brenda stated flatly, "I don't want you anywhere near that... thing."

"I'm all too aware my heart's electrically powered."

"Don't forget Bun-bun. Your skeleton's a computer, right?"

"It's got triple safeties. Have to pull that bit out, and attach that wire, before the timer can do anything at all."

"How close do you have to get it?"

"I don't think they've done proper tests. The guy just told me 'the closer the better'."

"I'll take it inside, then, and arm it. You can't, and the blue bi- lady doesn't know where the dangerous part of the zone is."

"I've got bun-bots who can follow directions and are a lot more disposable."

"That's sweet, but if the thingy goes off early, you lose a bun-bot and you can't make more. If I go in, even if I do something wrong and it goes off early, nothing happens to me."

"If something else goes wrong and you go in too deep, you'll melt."

"I remember where the zone grabbed me."

"What makes you think that's the furthest it /can/ grab you?"

"So I leave some leeway. Maybe get a stick to push the thingy farther."

"I'm of several minds about letting you go."

"Then I'll make things simple. I'm going. End of discussion."

--

I'd activated Munchkin's riot mode, in case its electrified surface happened to have an off-label use as a basic Faraday cage; and had the mini-fabber working overtime to produce real Faraday cages to shelter Boomer, Archie, Scorpia, and every other piece of electronics I could stuff inside one. (Including a brand-new metal-foil vest for yours truly.) After dropping off Brenda and the fully-charged EMP generator, I'd also set course for a couple of kilometers away. I had a sacrificial pair of walkie-talkies set up, one on a loose collar around Brenda's neck, the other on the ground outside the questionable protection of Munchkin's wiring.

"We're clear," I announced over the external intercom, through the radio's mike, and to Brenda. "And grounded. You can bring it in and set the timer."

"I'm already in," her voice came back. "Found a bunch of recent tracks and footprints. I'm going to set the timer and check where they go."

"Brenda, just set the timer - we can do the footwork in a few minutes. ... Brenda? ... Brenda!"

Sarah asked, "Did it go off?"

"No, the little light on the radio is still on. ... Sarah, I can't go anywhere near there while that thing's active, but if Brenda's gone off the rails..."

"Yeah, the stupid guards won't bother for a Changed, and I've got good legs for galloping. I'll see if she needs help."

--

I tried arguing with everyone I could get on the radio, who might get to the zone before Sarah made it. Their excuses were some variation of, "Sorry, gotta button up for the EMP."

It was an excruciatingly long wait.

--

The little light on the radio went out; its tuned circuits had been overloaded by a powerful, invisible, and extremely brief wave of electromagnetic radiation. I yanked the grounding spike out of the lawn I'd parked on, and set Munchkin at maximum safe speed back to the zone.

Sarah had her hindbody lying down, and was resting Brenda's head on her lap, stroking her feathers. As soon as Munchkin stopped, I stumbled out the door, making it the few steps to the pair before my legs twitched out of control, sending me down to the pavement.

"We should go," Brenda said. "Far away. Far, far as we can go."

Sarah said quietly, "Her beak's already half see-through, and it's getting more so. Whatever happened to her, the EMP didn't stop her."

My various subselves clamoured for attention, half-a-dozen thoughts trying to squeeze through my mind at once. I focused on one - probably not the best one, but being able to deal with one was better than not being able to deal with any. "Boomer. How long was it for Judith? Between when she left the zone, and when she... splashed."

"Given the data from the tracking bracelet, depending on when she left the zone: Between one and two hours."

"Just take me away," Brenda said. "So when I go, I won't hurt anyone."

"Fuck that," a certain small part of me reveled in my letting it swear when appropriate. "I kept Toffee from turning into a snake - er, physically - I can keep you from turning into a puddle. ... I can try, at least. Sarah, take her to the cargo carriage and make her comfortable."

--

"What the hell is that?"

"Zentai suit built for a griffon. Judith looked like she was still controlling herself even after she turned clear, at least for a few minutes. Maybe this'll help Brenda keep herself together. Just let me get a few samples for the autodoc before we seal her up."

"Uh - how will she breathe?"

"The material's supposed to be porous to air, but not water."

"Far, far, far, far far..."

--

The autodoc threw up its metaphorical hands. Whatever Brenda was turning into was still mostly made up of cells, but not any sort that its limited database could recognize.

"Boomer, I want to talk to Clara - where's the nearest heliograph station where I can open a live conversation with her?"

--

I dismissed the local station crew, and set up bun-bots to run the mirrors and relay the messages back and forth. The first signal was the Mayday call, which I had specifically designed into the heliograph network for any such situation where lives were on the line, and had the effect of clearing the line of any lower-priority traffic. After a few moments spent proving to Clara that I was me, and working out which method we'd use to talk to keep the other stations relaying our messages back and forth from knowing what we were talking about, my questions pretty much boiled down to, "Would the retroviral therapy we used on Toffee work on Brenda?"

Clara's answer was fairly simple. Paraphrasing a bit from the Morse-like code, she responded, "Maybe, but the previous stockpile was used against the snake-oids, and you do not possess the technology to create more. In addition, the fact that the process takes hours instead of years implies a different mechanism is at work, and a different counter-agent would need to be developed."

"Maybe we can come to you?"

"It is two hundred kilometers. Even at your vehicle's maximum speed, by the time you arrive, there will be insufficient time to develop a counter-agent."

"Is there /anything/ we can do?"

"Place her in another transformation zone, in hopes that the new change will interrupt the last. Inject the naffa-production retrovirus, with similar hope. Freeze her, in hopes that a better solution may be found later. Offer to assist with euthenasia, if that is a preferable demise. Collect her liquid remains, in case they still contain her neural patterns. Experiment with random biochemicals or forms of radiation in case one might interrupt the process without killing her. Provide a lab animal to determine if the condition is contagious. Be kind and comfort her during the time she has left."

"None of those sound like they're very likely to help."

"They aren't."

--

I sat down next to Sarah, and we gently transferred Brenda's head from her lap to mine. I couldn't see her eyes or expression through the suit's black material, but it was stretchy enough for her to open her beak. "That you, Bunny?"

"Yep."

"What's the word?"

"A bunch of ideas, none very likely to help," I reluctantly admitted, and relayed Clara's suggestions.

"I think I like that 'be kind' one."

"I'm not sure I'll be very good at it. We haven't even started with getting me to face deaths in my therapy."

"Bunny, I'm in love with you. I know it's artificial, I know you don't feel the same - I want you to end up happy. And, okay, I'm selfish enough that I want you to be a /little/ sad when I'm gone, but I want you to get over it. Maybe get together with the blue bitch-"

"Hey!" Sarah instinctively interjected, though without much force.

"- I can see she's got a thing for you, even though she's trying to stay in the friend zone. But for now - if you can't handle being here, I'm sure you can think of something important to do, somewhere far from here to go. But if you're up to it - I think I'd be happy if you just held me, and talked about anything."

How the hell could anyone refuse a request like that and still call themselves human?

So I held her. And I talked. And what I said is none of your damn business.

--

After some time... Brenda's form suddenly sagged, her mass puddling in the bottom of her suit in a way impossible for anything with a skeleton.

I kept talking for a few minutes... and then, as gently as I could, set the head of the suit on the floor. The liquid shifted as it found its new level.

And then it shifted again.

I scooted back from it, nervously.

The suit's wings slowly filled back out again; and then the head. The legs regained their shape.

A black-coated talon reached forward, curled all the claws save one, and ever so slowly, drew shapes on the floor: letters. Words. "STILL HERE", were the first two. "SENSES FUCKED" were the next.

Ever so hesitantly, I whispered, "Can you hear me?"

"WHOA. DO THAT AGAIN."

I complied.

"OK. GETTING HANG. TOO MUCH. SEE EVERYWHERE." After a few more minutes, she added, "OK. THINK I REMEMBER WHERE EVERYTHING GOES. NEXT: LUNGS." She made some disturbing ripples in her torso. "OK. NEED TO PRACTICE LUNGS LATER. CAN YOU OPEN SUIT?"

"If you can hear me, and understand me, what will you do if I do?"

"THINK YOU ASKED WHAT I'LL DO. TRY NOT TO SINK INTO DIRT."

Since Brenda's death sentence seemed to have at least been postponed, I ignored the parts of me that said it was a bad idea, reached to the suit's neck, and pulled back the magnetic, zipper-like seal.

When I got halfway, a mass of jelly spilled out, barely maintaining anything like a coherent shape, and coating my hands and forearms. In moments, my fur was gone, simply dissolved, and I started listening to the more cautious parts of my mind, yanking myself away from her with only minor burns to my skin.

"SORRY," Brenda finger-wrote, as she pulled herself out of the suit and back into her usual shape - though a tad more transparent than I was used to seeing her. "DIDN'T KNOW I DO THAT. I THINK I CAN CONTROL IT." She held up a talon, which morphed into a sphere, then a hand, then back into a talon. "THIS COULD BE FUN."

"Mmmaybe you should stay in the suit for now... until we're more sure about what's going on with you..."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Book Seven: Mis-*


*Chapter One: Mis-anthrope*

"Well, Doc?" Brenda chalked onto a lap-sized slate with one limb, as she squeezed the rest of her near-liquid form back into her griffon-shaped suit. "What's the verdict?"

"I may be a vet," Denise answered, "but even I know what patient privacy is."

"It's OK," Brenda wrote, sealing herself up. "I want Bunny to know."

Denise sighed, and flipped through her papers. "I can tell you more about what I can't find than what I can. Your cells seem to be undifferentiated - I can't find any that are even distinctly muscle or skin cells, let alone any actual organs. That includes a lack of nerve cells or a brain - I don't know how you're thinking, or what you're thinking with."

Brenda scribbled out, "What, no jokes?"

Denise glared. "This isn't a joking matter. You've been turned into a life-form even more alien than the squiddies. We don't know what might hurt you that the rest of us could just ignore. Maybe salt or vinegar is a deadly poison to you now."

Brenda wiped the chalk clear to make room for, "So take samples & test".

Denise shook her head. "I'm not comfortable with that. The samples I've already drawn held together for an hour, then the inter-cellular matrix dissolved, and the samples liquified into individual cells floating in water. Without knowing what you're using to think, any sample I take might be like scooping out a bit of your brain. And I'm not going to ask you to try splitting off larger pieces, given how much more likely part of your thinking is to end up in the wrong piece."

Brenda tilted her head - or, at least, shifted the part of herself in the head part of her suit to make it look like she did that. Then she shrugged (or at least imitated the gesture well enough), and added, "What do you know?"

Denise flipped a few more pages. "Well, for one, I figured out part of why everything looks weird to you. We can't see infrared; to you, it looks red. We can't see ultraviolet; to you, it looks blue. Almost all the colours of what we usually call 'visible' light look like green to you. I'm going to guess that's the best your brain can do to interpret the information your visual sense is giving you, and whatever you're thinking with is closely modeled on your original brain.

"Now, your problem with speaking doesn't seem to be creating hollow spaces that act like lungs, but with creating vocal cords to vibrate the air."

After a few more items, Brenda interrupted to ask about a particular detail. "Do you know what I eat? Do I need light like plants?"

Denise shrugged. "I haven't been able to get good observations about that yet. You can dissolve everything organic you've touched so far, and you can keep from dissolving it if you want. Beyond that, I think we mostly have to see what happens, if your body sends hunger or thirst signals to your mind, that sort of thing."

I finally spoke up. "Is she going to... be okay? Not suddenly melt?"

Denise shook her head, but not in an answer to my question. "There's no way to know. She could collapse any moment. She might be effectively immortal and outlive us all. If you're asking if she can leave the cargo bay... well, I'd /like/ to keep her confined indefinitely and keep running tests, but I've got no medical /reason/ to. Her newest Change doesn't seem to create any specifically identifiable danger to herself or others... so for now, I'm going to provisionally clear her from quarantine, as long as she keeps the suit sealed."

--

I dreamed I was swimming, floating in the water near the campground at Long Point.

I woke to a similar sensation... though with various exceptions that reminded me more of my time in the bimbo zone. I was surrounded in transparent /stuff/ that barely let me move - and which filled all my orifices. I couldn't inhale, but didn't seem to be suffering from a lack of oxygen. My breasts ached as if I hadn't been milked for many hours, and I had to pee.

I managed to tilt my head to look down at myself... my belly was inflated again.

I tried to scream.

One of the handheld AIs floated through the stuff, until it was almost touching my ear.

"Ooh, you're awake," a voice came from it - neither Alphie's nor Boomer's. "I figured out all /sorts/ of tricks I can do. Still can't make vocal cords worth a damn, but Alphie and I came up with a workaround."

I might have flailed and thrashed a bit.

"Oh, right. You still need air to talk. Hold on, this will be a bit tricky - I don't want to rupture your lungs as I pull out of them."

In a few moments, my head broke the surface of, well, Brenda, and I spent a few more moments gasping for breath.

While I was doing that, Alphie floated to the surface next to me, and said, "I figured out how to change my colour, too. Look!" The transparent goo turned to a see-through blue, and then became opaque.

"Brenda," I started to say, but she kept talking right over me.

"I moved almost all my thinky bits inside you. I can get rid of most of the rest, and just coat you, inside and out. I can be any outfit you want! I had to teach the cells in your gut not to try to digest me, of course, but that's sorted out. Uh, you may want to check if you're lactose intolerant now, but I'm pretty sure you can digest that on your own, right?"

"Brenda," I tried again.

"And if anyone tries to hurt you again I'll be right there to keep you in one piece, and even fix you up. Ooh, I bet I could even replace your organs with myself. Wouldn't that be nice? Bun-Bun could be your skeleton, and I could be your flesh, and you could be the brains, and Wagger could, uh, wag, and we'd all be happy together!"

I hurriedly stated, "Brenda, I don't want you replacing any of my organs."

"Even if you lose some?"

Since she was finally responding to my voice, I carefully said, "We can cross that bridge if we come to it. The bimbo zone took my organs apart, and I was very unhappy about it. Maybe you could practice on some lab animals before you try anything like that on a person - if you can't get vocal cords to work, you might have unexpected troubles with more complicated structures."

"I suppose that's safe. Say, maybe I can keep you safer if I just keep you inside me."

My neck sank a few inches into the blue spheroid of stuff, and I once again spoke quickly. "Brenda, I want you to let me out of you. And, er, to remove yourself from inside me. All of you."

She was silent for a long moment, but at least I didn't sink any deeper. "... Are you sure?"

"Call it a trust exercise... I want to be sure that you're still you in there."

There was a sigh. "Well, I suppose. Uh - it'll take a few minutes. I was exploring, and your milk ducts and urethra are kind of narrow."

After a few minutes of sensation for which the word 'uncomfortable' was wholly inadequate, I was sitting on my private carriage's floor, and Brenda was pulling herself back into griffon shape - though she was now favouring a see-through blue colour scheme. She shifted Alphie so that he was embedded in the front of her chest. "There, you're back to just you, and I'm all here. Happy?"

I pulled my arms around my once-again-deflated belly. "That's one word. Brenda, do you understand why I'm uncomfortable with what you just did?"

"Flashback to the zone?"

"... Brenda, what is it called when one person inserts something into another person's genitals, without having previously gotten permission to do so?"

"Ohshit! Ohmygod! I didn't even /think/ about it like that! You must hate me now and never want to see me again and-"

"Brenda!" I reached out one of my hands, which she'd accidentally de-furred earlier, to rest on her surface. "I don't hate you. I do think you should get some counselling, until you've settled into the new you. Fortunately, I happen to know someone who's dealt with problems /almost/ as unusual as this..."

--

Just to be on the safe side, I discreetly arranged for Brenda and Amy to meet up away from the shelter, and the bimbos remaining inside. Since we EMPed the zone, there was less of a likelihood that they'd vanish too - but with Brenda seeming to have absorbed at least some aspects of the bimbo zone, I felt that there wasn't anything to be gained by tempting fate.

The Civil Guard was still trying to track down all the bimbos who'd disappeared, but after seeing what happened to Judith, I wasn't holding out much hope... and despite all my technical doo-dads, I didn't have much else I could add to the search. So, with my counsellor dealing with her new patient, I went over my to-do list to see which items were near the top, priority-wise. One item caught my eye; I hadn't checked in on the city's constitutional committee during my week-long spell of intensive therapy.

--

"Mister... Owen Lears?" I asked the man in pajamas and a bathrobe.

"Yes?"

"/There/ you are!" I glared at him. "Why are you here, instead of the hall put aside for the committee?"

"Committee? Oh, yes, that - we finished that on the first day, and all voted to go home."

"... Really. You wrote a constitution in one day."

"We didn't have to do much writing. We just took the old American one, and replaced 'states' with 'unions'."

"... That's /it/?"

"Why would we need to do anything else?"

"... There are /so/ many ways I could answer that. But I'll try to focus on the personal consequences: I don't see how I would be willing to accept such a slapdash job, and by the provisions of the treaty, my refusal would mean a reversion to rule by military occupation. Trust me, after you bungled a generous opportunity for civil government, you would /not/ like how that plays out. And I have projects I would much rather be doing than running this town."

"Yeah? So?"

"So any of your committee members who aren't back at the hall in one hour are going to get arrested."

I turned my chair around - I already missed Brenda's help maneuvering it - and rolled back toward Munchkin without another word.

--

"Purple fox?"

"Er... yes, ma'am?" The Bayesian cultist was still scrambling into his robe and hood as he answered the door.

"Show me your constitution draft."

"Yes, ma'am!"

I spent some time going over both the main text, and the extensive notes.

Eventually, I got to his version of a Bill of Rights, and started wincing. "A clarification, here, please. Your free association clause - where you have, 'any person may ... refuse to transact with any other person for any reason'... does that mean a business owner may refuse to sell to people of a race or religion he dislikes?"

"Of course, ma'am."

"And a doctor may similarly refuse to treat a patient for religious reasons?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Hrm. Moving on... The freedom of thought and religion clause... 'nor shall the Government operate or support any school, college, or university'. No government-run education at all?"

"None, ma'am."

"And you have the government prohibited from issuing or regulating money."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And you prohibit occupational licenses."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Including preventing the government from having a monopoly on 'services of adjudication, protection, and enforcement' of rights."

"Exactly so, ma'am."

"And... any land-owner may secede with their property, becoming an independent state?"

"Yes, ma'am."

I set the papers down, frowning. "I have to say, this looks less like a constitution to protect its citizens' rights and improve their welfare than it does a recipe for paralyzing the government to such a degree that everyone secedes into 'sovereign' armed households."

"That's exactly right, ma'am."

I blinked, then frowned harder. "Even if doing so means everyone ends up poorer and worse off than if they cooperated more?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"If you know that's the likely outcome - then /why/ did you design this thing that way?"

"The wealthier and more cooperative people are, the more likely they are to re-develop the technology that will cause a second Singularity. Arranging for as many people as possible to act as sovereign individuals is likely to hamper technological innovation, to the degree that a new Singularity becomes impossible. I have another set of notes on my economic calculations, if you wish to read them, ma'am."

"... No, thank you. I think I've learned what I need to know for now."

--

Sarah rolled me into the conference hall right on the one-hour dot. To my relief, it looked like the number of people matched the committee membership list. (Threatening arrest was one thing; getting the Civil Guard to carry it out, with the Free Company withdrawn back to their home city, would have been tricky, and possibly might have crashed the whole program.)

After some consideration, and consultation of Boomer's knowledge of history, I was trying to pull a MacArthur, and had donned my Commander-in-Chief outfit. Sarah had grumbled a bit about having to wear more than a vest, but I'd gotten her decked out in a full-body camouflage thing that looked military-ish without actually being so.

Sarah moved me to the head of the table, unceremoniously shoved the chair there out of the way, and installed my wheelchair in its place. I folded my hands together, watching as the dozen-ish people started shuffling over.

Before they'd even sat down, I started talking. "The /injuries/ I received after your /former/ government kidnapped me have prevented me from giving this group appropriate oversight and direction. You are /supposed/ to be arranging for the structure of your future politics - and you couldn't even put more than a day's effort into it. Now, I'd like a quick show of hands: How many of you can explain how a first-past-the-post election system tends to lead to polarization into two camps, while a ranked-preference election system doesn't?"

No hands rose. I sighed.

I pulled out my walkie-talkie. "It's as bad as I was afraid of. Send in Purple Skunk."

After a few moments, a figure in an identity-concealing robe and cowl entered the hall and joined us at the table. I introduced her, "This individual appears to have more knowledge about government documents than all of you put together. I should have brought her in at the beginning, but was distracted by medical concerns. Consider her my representative at these talks, and listen to her advice."

One of the committee members finally spoke. "Who is she?"

I focused my ears on him. "What difference does it make?"

"Well... which union is she with?"

"I repeat - what difference does it make?"

"I just want to know which group's interests she's trying to advance."

I managed a tight smile. "/Mine/. And I'm not in any of your interests." I drummed my fingers on the table for a moment. "Perhaps I need to clarify something. According to the terms of the peace treaty, the one which all your union bosses signed, I can pick any constitution I want and that would be the law. The reason this committee exists at all is due entirely to my leniency. Externally-imposed constitutions don't have a great success record, since the local population generally has particular concerns that such constitutions don't address. If you're willing to use something as close to the old American constitution as possible, then it's obvious there are no such concerns, and thus I should have no compunction in picking whatever constitutional details please me. That said - Purple, why don't you offer a few highlight suggestions?"

"Almost any form of preferential voting more accurately represents a community's desires and interests; instant runoff is simple enough for our purposes, but both single transferable vote and mixed-member proportional representation have their advantages. Line-item vetoes reduce pork. Constitutional requirements that laws have explicit goals, and amendments have to be related to those goals, gets rid of all sorts of potential boondoggles. Requiring metrics to measure those goals, and an expiration date for laws if they fail to meet those goals, is untested but worth considering. Prediction markets were part of the platform in the twenty-forty insurrections, and the documentation on them was distributed enough that even after those movements were put down, we have enough information to create our own system."

I reached into my wheelchair's pannier, withdrawing some bundles of papers, which I tossed onto the table to spread out a bit. "Here's a constitution created by one of your local citizens - along with some notes I've added on the parts of it that serve his interests more than yours. There are some interesting possibilities in its bill of rights you'll want to discuss, such as determining whether an entity is competent to be a person with rights; whether the right to bodily integrity means having to serve as life-support for another entity against your will; whether a patent or copyright system should be within your government's power or constitutionally forbidden; clarifying the right to bear arms. You have a /lot/ to discuss."

Another committeer leaned forward. "According to the reports I have gathered, you fancy yourself a Canadian. Does this mean you plan to reject any constitution based on the American one?"

My smile was much more genuine this time, since this question was actually relevant and productive. "At this point, the only constitutions I plan on rejecting are those in which no thought was put into, no consideration of alternatives made, no discussion, uh, discussed. You want a tri-cameral legislature, or for your Senate to be able to reject any bill with a one-third-plus-one minority vote? Go nuts. Want every bill to have to be read aloud, or voting to be compulsory? Fine by me. Really want to stick close to the American constitution? I can live with that - /as long as/ I can see that you've thought it over and really think that's the best approach."

I looked around, and went back to frowning. "Any other questions?" None of them spoke up, so I sighed a bit, and told them, "You've lost a week before your deadline. I suggest you make the most of the time you have left."

Purple Skunk started, "First, I think we should note down that we need to consider whether any given governmental position should be filled by election, by appointment, or by lot..."

--

I watched my legs twitch under Wagger's control as Sarah wheeled me back to Munchkin. When we were out of earshot of the committee members, she asked me, "Do you think they'll come up with something good enough?"

"I'm certain of it. I didn't specify what Purple Skunk's roles or responsibilities were, so she's got almost carte blanche to do whatever it takes to keep them talking. If nothing else, she can put together a draft constitution all on her own at the end of the week, but I'm pretty sure it won't come to that. These people were suggested by the unions - now that I've pointed out that what they're doing can affect their lives and pocketbooks, and they've got someone keeping an eye on them, I'm pretty sure they've got incentives to come up with /something/ they think I'll find more acceptable than forcing my own ideas down their throats."

"What if they are wrong?"

"Then I force my ideas down their throats. In the meantime, where are the kits? I think Brenda accidentally started my lactation reflex again..."

--

"Mister Mayor?" I asked.

"As I am only Mayor Pro Tem, and even that by your grace, Mister Edwards seems more appropriate. Tea?"

"No, thank you - I haven't gotten used to the local version yet." I also didn't want to blatantly insult him by scanning for poisons.

"What brings you to City Hall today, Your Majesty?"

"The bimbo disappearances this morning. Almost everyone who'd ever been in the bimbo zone has gone away - but the group I've heard called the 'Mayor's Harem' is one of the few exceptions. I would like to know why."

He poured himself a cup of some herbal infusion or other as he said, "I'm afraid that I'm as much in the dark as you are."

"Can you tell me where they spent the night?"

"In my room, with me."

"What sort of protections surround that room? Thick walls, locked doors, barred windows, underground bunker?"

"Nothing so elaborate; until your, shall we say, intervention, I have been a simple civil servant, and have lived modestly. I keep my doors locked, of course, but from the inside, and it is simple to leave."

"Does /anything/ come to mind?"

"Not particularly, no."

"Hrm. Perhaps I should talk to them."

"I doubt it would be worth your time, but if you wish, they are in the next room. I asked them to pick some funeral dresses; their minds are simple enough that that will likely occupy them until whatever memorial services are held."

--

"Candy? Crystal? Kelly? Karma? This is Bunny."

"Ooh," said one of the nearly indistinguishable blonde bombshells. "Is she a new bimbo?"

"Don't be silly," said another. "Her tits are too small. Is she your new girlfriend?"

"Is she hurt?" said a third. "Her legs are twitching. Can we give her a massage?"

"Maybe if I don't wear a bra, this dress will look right," said the fourth, still examining herself in some mirrors.

Edwards stage-whispered, "They are used to not understanding questions, but good at remembering what makes people happy."

"Um, ladies," I said, feeling oddly nervous but not having enough time to do a proper selves-query, "Some people were hurt last night. I want to find out why. Can you tell me what happened last night?"

"Well," the first one said, "after we ate, we all fu-"

Edwards coughed, very fakely, and, face red, quickly said "/After/ that."

"Oh, well," the first one said, "after that, we fell asleep."

"Where?" I asked.

"In bed, together."

"Did any of you wake up in the night?"

"I didn't."

"Not me."

"Nope."

"I don't like the lines these panties make."

I sighed. "Right. When did you wake up?" And so it continued, with nothing of value being learned. Eventually, I gave up. "Thank you all for your time," I said.

"Did we help?" asked one, bouncing.

"... Well, you helped me rule out a lot of theories, so - sure, you did."

"Yay!" She bounced harder, grabbing the hands of a couple of the others and dancing in a quick circle with them.

As I watched the antics, at first they seemed nice and simple and cute... but then I wondered what they'd been before they'd been turned into these caricatures of femininity, what their lives had been before they'd been bent into this new shape. I muttered to Edwards, "I'm still uncomfortable with this whole thing - but as long as you're responsible for them, you're /going/ to take care of them, or else answer to me. Capiche?"

It seemed like I hadn't muttered quietly enough, because one of them - I'll admit that I still couldn't tell them apart, stomped over to us. "You can't talk to him like that! He's the mayor! That means he's in charge!"

I managed to raise an eyebrow, Spock-like, then glanced sideways at Edwards. "Is there anything you want to tell them?"

"You mean, like you can fire me?"

"Huh?" blinked the one who'd made the objection. "She can fire you? How does that work?"

I tried to keep things simple. "It's complicated," I offered, since that covered pretty much everything.

"Huh?"

Edwards shrugged. "She's a queen, and I'm a mayor. Right now, she outranks me."

"Oooo-ooooh!" the three chorused, and then the fourth chimed in with a quick "Oh!" and dropped the hats she was examining. All four walked right up to me, surrounding my wheelchair.

"So," the one in front of me licked her lips, "/you're/ the one in charge?"

I looked at Edwards, eyes wide, and squeaked a quick, "Help?"

He just folded his hands behind his back, and looked up towards the ceiling in a vaguely British-y, butler-y way. "It is, of course, my duty to give such callipygian and callistethous women lives that are as dignified as possible, given their artificially limited mental capacities, a significant part of which involves respecting any choices or preferences that they do manage to express. One of the more fundamental choices which a person who has been judged to be not entirely mentally competent can make involves expressing a desire for or against any particular caretaker, and given your own recent statement of your willingness to oversee my responsibilities for them, I can only assume that any transfer of guardianship which happens to be made at this date and in this place is voluntary on both parties' sides, meaning that as a good mayor, and, if I may be so bold, a good man, my only option is to step back and allow the obvious matters to take their own course in their own good time."

The bimbo behind me had started rubbing my shoulders. "He gets like that when he doesn't want us to understand."

Edwards' face turned into what might be described as a smile, of such infinitesimal proportions as to avoid affecting the standard 'stiff upper lip'. "Put simply, girls - if you want her, she's yours."

"Ooh!" they chorused.

"Eep!"

 

[DataPacRat]

Chapter Two: Mis-cible*

"Note to self: Look into non-lethal methods of self-defense, to deal with people who aren't trying to kill me, but are being... obstacles. I think Boomer mentioned something about tranquilizer darts..."

--

While I was at City Hall, I had Edwards show me their computer. I knew they had one, because he'd made some print-outs on a relevant topic the first time I'd seen him.

It was in the basement, and brought a pang of familiarity. Behind locked doors, inside what appeared to be walls lined to act as a Faraday cage, there was a tower, pretty much of the same style that had been in use from the eighties to when I died; plus monitor, keyboard, trackball, printer, the works. Edwards mentioned, "It was thirty years out-of-date when the Singularity happened," which meant it still looked a few years more futuristic than what I recalled. (The stuff from just before the Singularity itself was different enough that my mind didn't really categorize it as 'computers'.) However, in addition to being stylish, it was also worn-out and falling apart. The plastics were yellowing; all the keys had their symbols hand-painted, and some had even been replaced with carved wood; and I didn't want to think about what it would have taken to keep the physical moving parts going.

And even with all of that, I was still tempted to claim the whole thing as part of my reparations. I lent my main subself alliance lend its support to my utilitarian subself, overruling my "Ooh, shiny!" subself, and tried to mollify the latter by pointing out that I had a freaking Turing-grade AI in my pocket.

The harem - I had no intention of calling it /my/ harem - had been left behind at the locked door, but were still waiting to pounce as soon as we returned. "I know you have some kind of encyclopedia on there," I said to Edwards, thoughtfully. "How extensive is it?"

"I have yet to be disappointed in what it offers."

"So if I asked you to find an instruction manual for, say, royal handmaidens and ladies-in-waiting..?"

He did his almost-smile again. "An interesting choice," was all he said as he sat down, and started turning things on. (I had to suppress my reactions when I discovered it to be running Windows XP - I wanted to both laugh and cry and scream that /that/ OS was the one to survive the apocalypse.)

"Er - /can/ any of them read?"

"Kelly still retains that skill, yes."

As he printed out some old booklets and decorum, etiquette, and ladylike behaviour, I wondered aloud, "Is this the best computer you have left?"

"There is a certain amount of ill feeling towards such objects. We do not publicize this machine's existence; and even those who are aware of it think of it as a necessary evil, when they do think of it, much like a sewage processing plant."

"That is all very interesting and has many connotations but, I notice, did not actually answer my question."

"'Best' implies that we have more than one."

"If you could have one, why couldn't you have more than one?"

He sat back and folded his hands. "This machine was assembled by my predecessor - as Secretary, not as mayor - from parts that were confirmed to be in storage, unplugged and unpowered, from long before the Singularity. Simply finding a full set of piece that were compatible with each other took several years. All forms of input, save for this keyboard and trackball, were physically removed, had their wires snipped, and/or had their sockets blocked. Similarly, all forms of output save this screen and printer. The power line contains several forms of conditioning to smooth out any unusual spikes that might affect it. The door contains a physical mechanism which interrupts the power unless it is closed; no piece has ever been powered up save while in this protected room. For several years, there was a decorative water feature outside to muffle any sounds from within, and an armed guard. When I became Secretary, I spread the rumor amongst the knowledgeable few that I kept this machine because I had become addicted to video games. In short: there are three pieces for which I have no replacement parts, at least none that can be used without risking the compromise of the whole machine. If no replacements have been procured by when they fail, then I will be forced to rely on hand calculators."

"If you like, I may be able to help with that." I thought of one of the Bayesians, Blue Rabbit, who'd claimed to have finagled a computer out of Clara.

"That is kind of you, but unnecessary. I will not be mayor very long."

"You're not going to seek election to, er, whatever post the constitutional committee comes up with?"

"I was appointed to be secretary. I served. I was appointed Mayor Pro Tem. I am serving. When I am done serving, I will seek to be appointed as secretary again, or a similar posting. I am not well-suited to executive positions. I do not possess the... people skills."

"I suspect we could spend quite some time commiserating with each other about that, but for the moment... what do you have on here?"

"Business and accounting software, and a cache of significant portions of several projects: encyclopedias, a library of texts whose copyrights had expired, a different library of texts whose copyrights were waived, yet another library of texts that were still under copyright and illegal to possess at the time - that latter has been at least as much help as all the others combined. There are various other pieces of software, from maps and star-charts to a simple version of the 'trust verification architecture' that became ubiquitous after this data was stored; but we rarely use any of those, given that increased use increases the odds of an irreplaceable part failing."

"Do you know how much data there is, in total?"

"The figure that was passed to me was fifty terabytes."

"That seems like both a lot, and not very much. More than I could manage to make a copy of just now, and a fraction of the storage sizes I've seen bandied about for twenty-fifty era computers."

"Intact storage devices are one of the more common finds; the main difficulty is examining them for useful data without compromising the remainder of the library. It would not be difficult to transfer a portion of these archives onto one for you, if you can narrow down your choices to two terabytes or less."

I hesitated, faced with that choice. "I have to admit," I managed to think aloud, "that your rumour of video game addiction is all too plausible. There are many things I /should/ be doing - but if I was faced with the choice of doing them, or in revelling in all the fiction and media and games you could give, well... I'd be using up a lot of willpower." That made me frown. "And I think that's an answer, there - if I have to actually /will/ myself to keep doing something, then sooner or later, I'll face the choice while my mental energy is low. Meaning that it's in my best interests to arrange matters to minimize such choices. So as much as I /want/ to grab this computer and not let go for the next three years... maybe just an encyclopedia, an index of the whole lot, and whatever other non-fiction the city's used and happens to fit?"

--

"Without violating any confidences, Amy, can you tell me how Brenda is doing?"

"Who is doing the asking? Queen Bunny, Brenda's friend, or a fellow patient?"

"I'll start with my Queen hat. Is she a danger to others?"

"Her imprinting on you seems to have been magnified; at the moment, she is plausibly likely to use excessive force against anyone she perceives to be a threat to you, and possibly to use extreme measures in her attempts to protect you."

"Do I want to know what those 'extreme measures' are?"

"I'll put it this way; I contacted Doctor Black to find Brenda some experimental animals to practice her abilities on, so that even while under stress or performing other activities, she does not dissolve any tissues she would regret having dissolved. About all I can guarantee is that she is psychologically incapable of harming your central nervous system."

"And as her friend - is she going to harm herself?"

"Answering to you-the-friend, I have to be careful about discussing certain issues, but her fixation on you means that if you come to harm she believes she could have prevented, she will... not take it well. Her guilt may lead her to punish herself by attempting to subordinate herself to you in a very unhealthy manner."

"As in, replacing my flesh with herself?"

"Oh, she already told you that? Yes, merging with you in such a fashion is currently one of her central fantasies, though I am trying to nudge her in the direction of healthier outlets."

"Then I suppose it's time for me to get back to being one of your patients for a while. ... Has anyone mentioned to you that I saw a woman die today? Or as good as, I think..."

--

Back in the shelter's garden to relax after my latest session, I'd parked my chair at the end of a small path, where I could keep an eye out for anyone coming in my direction. So I was able to follow a blue-tinted, quadrupedal form all the way from the door into the house right up to me. Brenda stretched out on the bench that was installed to face the flowerbeds along the edge of the wall, and the vines climbing up it, as if she had a perfectly ordinary skeleton and set of muscles that needed minding. Alphie was still in her chest, and it looked like something else was embedded deeper within her.

"So," I said, "how're things?"

"Amy has helped me to understand that you might have perfectly valid objections to some of the things I want to do with you. So I'm putting together evidence that at least some of those objections are unfounded." She lifted a wing and waved at herself with it. "I've got a squirrel in here right now. She's fine, swimming around, I just make sure my surface tension is high enough to keep her from getting out. I'm going to try to make sure she stays fine when I'm asleep, and then tomorrow, that I can keep her fine when I run through an obstacle course and stress tests. If I can keep her safe through all that, then I should be able to keep you safe if you let me be your living bodysuit."

"... Uh-/huh/. ... Figured out what you /do/ eat yet?"

"I got hungry earlier, and absorbed a salad and some potatoes. Denise thinks that I'm going to need more calories than I used to, since it'll take more effort to move nutrients around inside me without a proper circulatory system."

I watched the squirrel paddle up through her neck and into her head, bounce against her skin a few times, and then keep paddling right back into her torso.

After a few moments of silence, Brenda added, "I'm also trying to figure out how to be as useful to you as I can. I'm working on controlling extra limbs, and trying to make my claw-tips as hard as possible, and turning them into complicated shapes... it's not working too well, yet, but I have high hopes. Oh! And when I put some of my extra mass in the freezer, I was able to absorb it right back into me as soon as it was above freezing, so you won't have to worry about me being trapped on you because I can't be just me anymore."

"Mm-hm," I made a noncommittal sound. My weird-o-meter had pegged itself at 'maximum' at the sight of the squirrel, so I wasn't really following. "Oh, by the way - the mayor's harem seems to have adopted me instead of Mayor-Pro-Tem Edwards. I've distracted them with some pamphlets on how royal servants act, but they'll probably catch up with me again soon. I don't know them well enough to trust them with any secrets, so you'll probably want to decide how intelligent you want them to think you are... and, I don't know, see if you're up to playing dress-up as, er, the dresses. I think I've got four outfits for different situations, and they're probably not going to accept that - and I shudder to think of the results if I let them anywhere near the clothes fabber. ... Or let them know that 'clothes fabber' is a thing that can exist."

--

The next morning, I made my way back to the Civil Guard outpost where I'd collected the EMP generator; my plan was to ask about safe retrieval methods. My plan was derailed as soon as I asked, "How has the search for the women who went missing yesterday gone?"

"Oh, that was a big fuss over nothing. We found 'em all, easy enough."

My ears went straight up. "Really? Where?"

"First place we should'a looked - the shelter we always find 'em at."

My ears flattened back again. I'd just come from that shelter, and there hadn't been any extra bimbos about the place. It looked like the mental glitch was striking again.

When I got back to Munchkin, I was once again trying to figure out the implications of that glitch, and just nodded to Sarah absently. "How's the mayor's harem doing?"

"The mayor has a harem now?"

I paused, and decided this was as good a time as any to try prodding on the topic. "Sarah, how long have I had a harem?"

"At least as long as I've known you, I guess."

"And what do they all have in common?"

"Why are you asking?"

"I just got reminded of something, and want to see if my memory's straight."

"Well, if you don't count the bun-bots, they're all bimbos."

"And where do bimbos come from?"

"Here in Erie."

"And when was the first time I came to Erie?"

"Three years ago, the day you were shot."

"Did we meet before then?"

"Yes."

"Did I have my harem then?"

"I guess."

"How could I have had a harem of bimbos from Erie when we met, if I hadn't been to Erie by then?"

Sarah didn't answer right away, just frowned, and blinked rapidly.

I decided that I'd confused her enough, so offered her an easy out. "Don't worry about it - you've got some memory issues, is all. Lots of Changed people do, especially animal-form ones."

"Animal-form Changed... right."

"Have you seen Denise lately? there's a few things I want to ask her, too."

"Not... lately." She blinked one more time, then shook her head. "Not since yesterday. By the way, I've been meaning to ask you - now that Brenda is too squishy to pull your chair, how about we get some tack and harness for me, too?"

"I'm not really sure that's appropriate," I shrugged. "She was acting as a service animal, not a person. I'm not sure it would look appropriate if you took that job."

"I'm used to it. To be honest, I've kind of missed pulling stuff for a while - Denise really treated me well while I was a pony, before she found the foxtaur zone to give me arms and a human brain again."

This was the first time I'd heard anything of the sort; up until now, Sarah had told me she and Jeff had been Changed by accident. I looked up and down at her nervously, wondering just what was going on. "Um," I hedged, "besides, the clothes fabber can make things that look like leather, but we don't have any of the real stuff for feedstock."

"Oh, is that all? I'll just draw from petty cash and get some from the marketplace."

"Still think it's better, if you want to help me with my chair, to push it instead of pull it."

"Don't you always say to be prepared? There's lots of things you might need help pulling with - I don't know why we haven't made the tools for that until now."

"It's a mystery," I agreed, my gut clenching at the implications of what had just happened.

--

What do you do when you discover a zero-day exploit that affects /people/?

I'll admit that I spent a few moments fantasizing about harem-izing the whole town into slaves eager to do my slightest bidding.

... Okay, a few minutes.

And then, after that self-indulgent interlude, I turned back to reality. If the glitch let one person induce people to confabulate new memories, then there didn't seem any reason more than one person couldn't do the same thing. Or, put more simply - someone /else/ might do /more/ than spend a few moments fantasizing about the mass-slavery thing.

In fact, as I thought about it, that seemed to be a remarkably convenient glitch to have arisen by mere evolution by natural selection. If nobody else had already taken advantage of the whole situation... then I guessed it was only because they hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Even outside whatever soft and squishy feelings I had for any particular individuals affected by the glitch, simple long-term self-interest - and short-term self-defense - was enough reason to try to figure out a patch for everyone in town who had it. Not to mention figuring out enough about it to make sure it wasn't transmissible.

Unfortunately, the only ways I could come up with to even start getting a basic feeling for the parameters of what the glitch could and couldn't do involved testing it. That is, in deliberately altering peoples' minds without their consent.

The phrase 'the ends don't justify the means' was pretty much made for just such an ethical dilemma. But as I thought about it, several of my sub-selves brought up the question of whether that phrase was actually /true/ or not.

I decided that getting some external advice might help me sort out the solutions. However, if the glitch was deliberately created as a slave-maker, then it seemed within reason that it contained some sort of self-defense aspect, which meant that asking anyone already affected by the glitch might not lead to useful answers. I only knew of five people who'd been in Erie and seemed unaffected: myself; Dotty and Human Joe, who were dead; Minerva, who, the last I'd seen of her, had been happily playing with dolls and puppets; and Bunny Joe.

As I set Munchkin's course for the Lake Erie Embassy, where I'd heard many of the gang had shacked up during my convalescence, I put my mind to thinking of how to deal with the fact that I might accidentally trigger the glitch, and what I should do if I did.

--

Bunny Joe was not, in fact, at the Embassy; she was aboard the Travelling Matt. In particular, she was stretched out in a hammock, reading a book. As I rolled up, she just raised an eyebrow and asked, "Are you sane yet?"

"Eh, it's back to being a matter of opinion. Listen, I need some advice."

She rolled so she was sitting, facing me. "About?"

"It's complicated, but it starts with what used to be the mayor's harem."

"'Used to be'?"

"Well, the four bimbos seem to have picked me over Edwards."

Joe didn't answer, she just blinked rapidly, looking off at a wall.

I froze, tense, since that was exactly what Sarah had done when the glitch triggered in her. My mind felt blank - all I could remember from my recent musings was to try to keep people the way they were, reinforcing whatever behaviours and memories they already had. I recalled that Bunny Joe had been created by the 'spirits' of the Great Peace to help me psychologically, which she had interpreted in her own way. Which is why I told her, "Also, I think I could use a hug."

She blinked back into focus, looking down at me, eyebrows raised even higher, but with a smile. "Really? Well, I'm not going to say no to /that/." She slipped down to the floor, and after a bit of awkwardness around the wheelchair, she solved it by sitting on my lap, twisting sideways so we could wrap our arms around each other. "This is nice," she said.

"Mm-hm," I said, not committing either way, feeling mainly confused. A couple of weeks ago, when I'd been revived, Bunny Joe hadn't been affected by the glitch, in all the three years I'd been frozen. Now she had. What had changed since then? Well, her brain had, obviously, for one thing.

"Now, what did you want to ask me about?"

I certainly wasn't going to ask her about what I'd been planning to - not if she was as glitched as everyone else in town. "Maybe we should talk in private," I hedged. "Munchkin's parked over on the dock."

"If you like." She rolled off my lap, and she was soon pushing me down the gangplank.

"Oh, by the way," I said, "while I've got you here, I'd like to have the autodoc scan you for a few things." I made up an excuse on the spot, "The Free Company had to be wearing those gas masks for a reason, and I don't want any of us to be taken by surprise by a species-specific pathogen."

"If you like," she repeated, with a shrug.

The autodoc didn't have radioisotopes, X-rays didn't show soft tissues well, and there were far too many metallic parts to the autodoc for them to have built in an MRI. But it did have ultrasonograph gear, and something called 'photoacoustic imaging', and something else called 'functional near-infrared spectroscopy', and - most importantly - scans of Bunny Joe's brain taken long before she'd ever set paw in the city of Erie.

While she settled into the coffin-like device, I checked with Boomer about the areas of the brain associated with memory or confabulation - and, at Boomer's suggestion, anosognosia, the inability to recognize a disability - and tapped the autodoc's controls to focus on those regions.

I was about as far from a brain surgeon as you could get - really, all I was at the moment was being a monkey's pair of hands, following Boomer's directions.

To have Joe think about something not quite related to the bimbos, I asked, "I've been thinking about the bun-bots... is it overly creepy that I have almost a dozen robots that look exactly like me, and do anything I tell them to?"

Joe tried to shake her head, but the scanners held it in place. "You made them as your tools, as I was made to be a tool of the spirits. I am more 'creeped out' by their mechanical innards, than anything else about them."

I nudged the conversation towards the topic at hand. "So you would be happier if I had living slaves doing my bidding?"

"If you want advice, you should ask someone from your culture, not mine. We do not have the same taboo against taking prisoners of war from raids, and bringing them into our families, that you do."

"Should I pass the harem of bimbos on along to you, then?"

She started blinking rapidly. "I... do not think they'd agree..."

I didn't want a random association affecting her very much, so I tried to focus her back with the same distraction I'd used before. "I'm just not a very huggy person, like you."

"Hugs - yes, physical affection is important..." She squinched her eyes shut for a moment, then tried to shake her head again as she opened them. "According to the local school, a harem exists so its members can help each other, when their owner is not available. If you have not been able to provide them with what they need, they provide for each other."

"Mm... I suppose that's one way to look at it." My attention was more on the autodoc's displays than the conversation.

"Is there a reason this exam is taking so long? It did not seem so long last time."

"Just want to be thorough," I commented, and quickly brought it to a close.

As soon as Joe was free, she casually walked up behind me, resting her cheek on the top of my head and her arms on my shoulders. "If you don't want to hug them, then I can hug you instead," she said. "Have you been hugging your mind healer?"

I blanked out the display. "Er, no - that's not how that works." I wondered if I'd focused too hard on the hugging, and whether /that/ might have long-term effects... "Can you help me into the auto-doc? I should probably get a quick scan, myself." Not to mention give her a reason to stop hugging me for a few minutes.

Joe squinted at the main display. "What does 'Anomalous electroplaques in upper thorax' mean?"

"... I don't know, but I probably should find out."

 

[DataPacRat]

Chapter Three: Mis-diagnose*

"One of the white matter tracts between the fusiform face area and the hippocampus appear to have been interrupted."

I rolled my eyes at Boomer. "I never did finish going through my human-brain colouring book."

"The individual subsections of the brain appear to be intact; it is the connection between them that appears to have been severed. A very small number of cells were affected - Bunny Joe's brain scan still appears to be within normal parameters. It is only in comparison to her previous scans, and those of other affected individuals for a similar variation, that any difference is detectable."

"So we have our fingerprint?"

"If you wish to call it that, yes."

"And does this interruption explain the... weirdness in their behaviour?"

"Unknown. It is plausible that this neural tract leads to an inability to recognize or remember changes in groups of people, but the data is insufficient to confirm or disprove that hypothesis."

"And the confabulation?"

"It is possible that that is the normal result of this form of memory disruption. Again, the data is insufficient-"

"-To confirm or disprove, I getcha. Okay, so if that's what's happening... are there other effects? I mean, would it affect their recognition of groups other than the bimbo harem?"

"Unknown."

"Hm... could there be some connection with why their politics focuses around their unions?"

"Unknown."

"Have you got any idea how that one particular connection happened to get severed in so many people?"

"Studies exist demonstrating that certain neural pathways express unique combinations of proteins and antigens, which can be used to target treatments. I have no information on whether this neural pathway has such an antigen signature."

"Something we can ask Clara to check the library on. Even assuming that's the case... what might have actually latched onto that signature?"

"Extrapolating from a few words in my database, I would posit a virus or organism could attach to the antigens in question, optionally followed by a drug targeting the virus or organism and killing both it and the neurons it was attached to."

"Okay - but Joe's been in Erie for three years, and just started exhibiting symptoms of the glitch, well, sometime between the last day and a week or so ago. Would your virus-or-whatever take that long to do its thing?"

"Possible, though that progression is uncommon."

"So... maybe she avoided getting infected at all, until just recently?"

"Possible."

"So what did she avoid doing for three years, that she just started doing, that includes a disease vector? Did she start drinking the wrong water? Walk too close to the bimbo zone?"

"Unknown."

"And - you're sure there's no sign of the interruption in my neural pathway?"

"Correct."

"Okay, then to add to my previous question - what did she start doing, since I was revived, that Minerva and I haven't done?"

"Unknown."

--

I rolled up front again, leading around the kitchen counter to see Bunny Joe. "You've got some signs of a possible infection," I said, entirely truthfully; though also somewhat deceitfully; though also in Joe's own best interests. "I need to ask a couple of epidemiological questions."

She looked up from her book. "Of course you do," she sighed. "Very well."

"Since my revival, have you begun doing anything that you have not done in the previous years you were in the city, which might have unknowingly exposed you to a disease; possibly started eating a new food, or drinking a beverage from a new source, or meeting a new person, or going to a new place; that /isn't/ a new thing /I/'ve also done?"

"Are you serious?"

"As can be."

"You really need to ask?"

"It's important."

"I mean - you don't already know?"

"I've been busy."

"'Furry orgy'."

"What?"

Joe sighed. "Sarah and I have entered into a sexual relationship. You were right there when she first propositioned me."

"... Oh. Right." I looked away from her, trying not to blush. "... I think that could fit the timeline. Is there anything else?"

"Other than being imprisoned, there is little I have done that I have not already done, or that you were not with me for."

"Alright. ... I'm not an epidemiologist, so I'm probably going to need to bring Denise and Clara in on this, and we might need to do a few tests to figure out how to cure it."

"Do you wish some of my blood now?"

"... I suppose the autodoc can draw it, we've got the fridge to store it, and it seems likely some useful tests could be run on it."

--

"Okay, Boomer; we've got something that seems to be some sort of STD, which has effects on the brain. How many things do you know of that fit that category?"

"I am not aware of any known pathogen which has the described neurological effect."

"I'm not asking about the effect, just for things transmitted by sex that can pass through the blood-brain barrier."

"Query: Does this include the barrier being damaged via meningitis or a brain abscess?"

"Since so many people seem affected, and Sarah doesn't seem to have meningitis, let's say no."

"There are several diseases that pass the barrier. Some are not ordinarily sexually transmitted, such as trypanosomiasis, rabies, Toxoplasmosis gondii, or progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy. Some can be, such as HIV, neurosyphilis, and certain prions."

"And since none of those cause the brain effect we've seen, it could be something completely unrelated to any of them."

"That seems possible."

"Is it even possible to test for all the ones you listed?"

"Yes."

"... With the equipment we've got?"

"Several of the tests require reagents that I have not seen any evidence of, within this city."

"Mm. If the nearest place to get those reagents is Brock University, we might have to try to bring some people through the Great Peace to try testing them there... I suppose it would have been too much to ask Clara to test everyone for unknown diseases the last time we were there." I paused, then snapped my fingers. "Then again, maybe she still can."

"That does not seem to make sense."

"Boomer, you used to be Laura - in a sense - and so did Clara. If you were her, would you have thrown away any of the medical samples you took just after they'd been poisoned with the nerve gas residue?"

"I do not believe so."

--

I tipped the delivery boy, and retreated back into Munchkin (parked by the shelter) to open Clara's telegram. I read it aloud to Boomer, "Confirmation of presence of spirochaetes closely related to Treponema pallidum in Sample Group A, and absence of same in Sample Group B. Appears to be treatable with penicillin G." I set the paper down, frowning. "Well, that could be our smoking gun. The question is - what should we do about it? If it's a deliberately engineered, uh, spirochaete, then whoever released it probably wouldn't be happy about an eradication campaign... and would curing the disease clear up the blocked neural pathway? And on a more personal note, I don't know if /I/ might have been exposed when the bimbo zone or goo-Brenda went inside me, plus back in the day, I used to wear a medic-alert bracelet warning of an allergy to penicillin and supha drugs, though I don't know if I was /actually/ allergic or not, plus I've only got my brain and eyes left from back then to worry about allergy-wise anyway..."

"I possess insufficient data to offer advice on these matters."

"Hm... I didn't get pulled into the zone very much after Sarah and Bunny Joe started, um. So if I were infected then, I should have already started glitching myself."

"Your immune system is not quite human. It is possible that a disease may have a longer incubation period in your body than in Sarah's."

"I suppose. And Brenda gooped me not that long ago... Hm... Well, I had the robo-fac make up some penicillin before it crashed, but it's hardly enough to treat the whole city, so, hm..."

--

"Say, Denise? How much penicillin do you have in stock?"

"None."

"Why not?"

"It stopped working. Everything that used to be treated by it, became resistant to it."

"What do you use instead?"

"We've got five different antibiotics. To prevent any new immunity from evolving, me and the other vets coordinate to use the same one in a year, then switch to another the next year, and so on. We lose some livestock that we could save with more aggressive intervention, but we keep the whole system working. It's a sore spot with some farmers, who want their herd or whatever saved /now/ instead of thinking long-term, but we keep the drugs locked up tight enough that cheating is kept down to an acceptable level."

"How about for people?"

"I haven't heard of anything that can be treated with penicillin in a long time. Why do you ask?"

"I have reason to believe I may have been exposed to something which /can/ be treated with it, and I have a supply I acquired before finding out from you just now that it might be useless, and part of me may or may not be allergic to the stuff. Think you might be up to helping me work out an appropriate dosage, and keeping an eye on me in case of anaphylaxis?"

"Ah, so you /have/ gone completely crazy. Wait right here while I go find some nice young men in their clean white coats."

"Crazy would be if I tried injecting myself with penicillin, and didn't find a medical professional to watch for bad reactions."

"Maybe /I'm/ crazy for even listening to this. I haven't heard such craziness in... I don't know how long. I suppose I can take comfort in the fact that this /is/ as crazy as things get."

"Ah. Well."

She just sighed. "What is it?"

"Well, according to the autodoc, apparently, I seem to be turning into an electric eel."

"... Maybe I should join old Mrs. Friesen on the porch, with her rocking chair and laudanum. Then I could talk everyone's ear off instead of listening to idiotic people trying to talk about things they don't understand."

"If you're trying to tell me I'm not just out of my depth, but I'm also stupid, I'm not going to disagree."

"Bunny - allergies are based on your immune system. Your immune system is made of cells, mostly created in bone marrow. Your immune system is made entirely out of Bun-Bun's cells, not your original ones. Whatever you were allergic to when you were human, you aren't anymore."

"Ah. ... I'd offer you a raise, but I don't know if you still want to be employed by me for very long."

"Shut up and tell me what you think you're infected with."

"Er..."

"You know what I mean."

"Er, not just that, but I'm not sure I can tell you."

"Embarrassing or top secret?"

"I'll go with column B. I've been having Clara run some tests on some samples she already has, and there's a, um, reasonably good chance I've been exposed - but the tests to be sure need chemicals she doesn't think you have. So - if allergies aren't a concern, better safe than sorry."

"And you want penicillin instead of a real antibiotic?"

"I've got reason to think that the antibiotics you use regularly won't have a significant effect."

She heaved a sigh. "Let me check my books. I'm sure there's /something/ in there about outdated, obsolete, and useless antibiotic therapy for unnamed diseases which show no symptoms and might not even exist."

"I knew I could count on you."

--

"Ow." I rubbed my shoulder.

"You want to stop, you can stop any time. You want to keep going, then with what your Clara and my books say, you tell your autodoc to administer four MU of aqueous crystalline penicillin G intravenously, every four hours, for fourteen days."

".../Every/ four hours?"

"If you want to get a sufficient concentration of the stuff past your blood-brain barrier to where it'll do any good."

"/Now/ you think it will do good?"

"Your brain's from way back when. Maybe the strain of syphilis you've got is primitive enough that penicillin will work."

"It's /not/ syphilis."

"Don't sass me, boy. Or girl, whatever you prefer these days. There aren't many diseases that this can /be/ a cure to."

"... It may be related to syphilis. But it's not from 'way back when'."

"Then take your shots, and give me some warning if you think it's going to start spreading."

"... I think I can assure you that you don't have to worry about it starting to spread," I said, telling the truth in detail while deceiving by implication.

"In that case - what's this about turning into a fish?"

"Not fish, electric eel. The autodoc says it found 'electroplaques' in my body, cells that electric eels use to make, well, electricity."

"You're going to start giving people shocks?"

"They seem to be in my chest, not my hands."

"Any heart problems?"

"None. All the numbers I get from the recharger are inside the ranges they're supposed to be."

"How smart is your skeleton?"

"Smart enough to have learned her name, and follow commands - well, sometimes, at least."

"Smart enough to think she knows how to power your blood pump better than batteries do?"

"... Maybe. She kind of absorbed my hoof and Wagger into herself, so she could be trying the same with the artificial heart."

"Well, tell her to stop it. That heart needs a dozen watts, without interruption. That's a million joules a day. Do you think an /organic/ system could provide that power, regulated to a precise enough level to keep your blood flowing continuously? I don't even want to /think/ about how many extra calories you'd have to consume to try to power it yourself."

Boomer piped up, "Roughly two hundred forty dietary calories, not counting conversion losses."

Denise glared at the AI. "Shush, you, I'm on a rant." She turned back to me, poking a finger onto my chest, where my surgery scar was ever-so-slowly fading. "The batteries /work/. She tries fiddling with them, and you won't live long enough to finish treating your not-syphilis."

"Alright, already," I held my hands up in surrender. "I can't disagree with you - I don't know enough to even try. Just remember, I come in something like fifth place when it comes to deciding what my body does - you, Bun-Bun, Wagger, and whatever zone I get shoved in all seem to have priority. Maybe Brenda these days, too, depending on what she figures out she can do. You want to fight out which of you is ahead of the others, go ahead, just leave me out of it."

"And you wonder why I want you to have a real doctor instead of a vet."

"And you wonder why I want a multi-species physician instead of a mere human GP."

--

In my room at the shelter, I frowned at the half-finished letter, nibbling on the top of my pencil as I tried to figure out a better way to phrase the message.

Abruptly, a weight landed on my head, my vision obscured.

"Gah!" I gave a whole-body twitch, slipped one of the knives from my sleeves into my hand, and as I heaved around, I pushed it through whoever was trying to black-bag me.

My eyes were unblocked, revealing... Brenda, now in her pre-bimbofication colours, staring at the blade in her chest, her forelimbs changing back from tentacles into talons again. "Okay," she commented, "now I'm /really/ glad I'm not made of flesh any more."

"My door was /locked/." I looked over at it. "/Is/ locked."

"I've been learning more tricks. I can put some of my mass in a freezer, and reabsorb it as soon as it thaws." She plucked the knife out of her, holding it to me. "Yours, right?"

I grumbled, returning it to its hiding spot. "We really need to have a talk about boundaries-"

"Ooh, what's this? A secret diary page?"

"No, it's a private-"

"'Dear Minerva.' A love-letter? 'In regards to our private discussion, I have identified a novel pathogen endemic to this region.' ... Doesn't sound like a love letter. 'While the topic is awkward, the main method of transmission appears to be via body-fluid transfer, such as during sex. While you are probably too young for such activities at the moment, in the years to come, please try to remember this, and to arrange for any prospective partners to undergo the appropriate antibiotic treatment, to avoid becoming infected yourself.'"

I finally managed to pluck the paper from her grasp, and fold it up. "Are you quite done?"

"Not quite. I came to warn you the harem is waiting outside for you. Can I give you another whole-body hug? You can stab me again if you want to."

I rubbed my nose. "I'd really prefer if you didn't. I am currently undergoing an antibiotic treatment. I do not know whether or not you are susceptible to the pathogen, or can carry it, but we should avoid any... personal touching until we're both confirmed to be clear of it."

"So you want me to start taking this treatment too?"

"Not... exactly. One definition for antibiotic is 'a poison that kills some kinds of cells quicker than others'. I have no idea if the cells you're now made of are more or less susceptible to the poison than the pathogen... and even then, figuring out the dosage is an... interesting problem. You don't have a blood-brain barrier to get through - but you also don't seem to have a liver to metabolize the stuff to keep it from staying in your system at dangerous concentrations."

"Maybe I do, and it's just spread all through me, like my thinky bits."

"Maybe," I shrugged, "but even finding that much out is going to require tests."

"So you don't want to start wearing me now?"

"Brenda... if there is a literal life-and-death choice to be made, I'll wear you in an instant. But short of that - if we got that close again, I'd have to start my treatment from scratch. Which involves painful injections. Every four hours. For two whole weeks. So unless we're dealing with a situation where that amount of pain is worth paying, we should stay apart."

"No hugs?"

"We can hug, if you want - but like flesh people, with our arms, not whole-body engulfing."

"Are you sure? I can hide you inside me and get you past the harem..."

"Tempting, but no."

"How about if I make some air bubbles so I don't touch any part of you that can pass this infection?"

"... Do you know what the harem's waiting for me /for/?"

"I think I saw them writing a big questionnaire about what you like."

"... What the heck. We might as well figure out if this trick can work at all - you're not all /that/ much bigger than me."

"I left a lot of me in the freezer. I'm actually mostly hollow right now."

--

The harem saw through the ruse at once. Not literally - Brenda's outer shell was fully opaque, and I didn't have anything glowing - but from what I was able to muffledly hear, some combination of Brenda's gooey nature combined with the fact that the harem /knew/ I'd been in my room was enough for them to figure out my hiding place. In fact, one of them just stuck an arm right into Brenda, fumbled along my neck for a bit, and grabbed my arms, pulling me up and out of Brenda's back.

"/There/ you are, your majesty," she smiled brightly. (I still hadn't figured out how to tell which was which.) "We've been looking /everywhere/ for you."

I sighed, and stepped out of Brenda, resting an arm on the wall in case Wagger twitched my legs. "I'm very busy," I commented. I watched my right foot's toes curl and relax, curl and relax, without my telling them to, and decided a wheelchair would be more dignified than falling on my rear. I turned to head back into my room to grab it.

One of the bimbos slid in front of me. "You're not going to lock yourself away from us again, are you?"

My right knee pulled my calf up, and I started tipping over... only to land in the grip of one or two of the ladies. Neither staying in place and leaning on them, nor pushing against them to straighten back up, were acceptably polite outcomes, so I tried reaching a hand back in the direction I'd just been and muttered, "Brenda, a pull, please?" She waved a wing over, engulfed my hand in it, and with that leverage I managed to straighten myself back out.

The harem were glancing at each other, so I just frowned at them and stated, "Spine injuries are nasty things. Even though I heal better than some, I may have permanent damage. Adding physical rehabilitation to my counselling and all the other things I have to do means I barely have enough time to sleep, let alone stand around and play dress-up or have tea parties or orgies or whatever it is you did for the mayors."

"Ooh, /that/'s why," said the one behind me.

One of the ones I'd landed on said, "We're not here to make you do things-"

"-or us-"

"-you don't want to do."

"We're here to make your life /easier/."

"We won't make you play dress up-"

"-unless you want to-"

"-but we can take care of your clothes, so you can always be dressed up, without spending any time on it."

"Or cook."

"Or clean."

"Or watch your kids."

"I didn't think she had kids?"

"Maybe she just thinks she's too busy to raise them."

The patter of voices from all sides was confusing and annoying, so I cleared my throat and raised a hand to interrupt them. "That's all well and good. My wheelchair, if you please?"

"Sorry." "Sorry." "Sorry." "Sorry."

In short order I was installed on what I wondered if I should start calling my mobile throne.

I looked up at them, still frowning. "I did not request your services. I have no desire for them. Even trying to accommodate your nearby presence would be difficult, and would interfere with various security and intelligence matters. I am not in charge of the city. Mayor Pro Tem Edwards is, and then whoever is elected in his place will be. I recommend you go find him and help him instead of me."

They looked at each other again, then back at me. "Don't think of them as /services/."

"We just want to /thank/ you, for being our /guardian/."

"Our /protector/."

"Our cute little babe-cake."

"... who /watches over us/ and keeps us /safe/."

"Hrm," I grunted. "There's watching over you, and then there's watching over you. ... Which reminds me; Brenda, in the Munchkin, in the lab, in drawer seven C, could you grab the four things inside and bring them back?"

She nodded her head, said "Sure thing, boss," with Alphie, and bounded away, more like a rubbery cartoon or a deer pronking than any sane quadruped's gait.

I sighed and looked at the quartet, then sighed again. "I'm pretty sure," I commented, "there's more to life than finding the most powerful person around, and doing whatever it takes to convince them to protect you."

More shared glances, before one said, "If you don't go into heat, maybe."

"Having one husband is a lot less work than being a street-walker."

"Or a House girl."

"Or a 'gram girl."

I asked, "'Gram girl'?"

"It's new."

"Someone wants a girl, they can just send a telegram now, and one'll come over."

"... Of course," I rolled my eyes to myself. "I forgot the rule about what happens when humans get hold of new media."

"Huh?"

"'The internet is for porn'. Oh, look, here's Brenda."

The hollow, rubbery gryphoness bounced back to our little crowd, stuck a talon down her beak, and pulled out four black bracelets.

I said to the harem, "One for each of you. I want you to wear them at all times. If you get in trouble - and I mean /real/ trouble, something where you'll need medical attention or emergency rescue - press the red button. I'd prefer if you could remember to push the green button once a day, which will let me know you're alright and haven't been kept from pushing the buttons."

"Ooh, shiny!"

"Black /does/ go well with almost anything..."

"It's a lot less annoying than that collar."

"I kinda liked the collars."

What I didn't mention was that these bracelets were new and improved over the ones that had let me find Judith; they would respond to a coded signal to pinpoint their location, if I ever had to find them. Not to mention pinging their location every ten minutes instead of every hour. I wasn't sure if the solar cells could keep a full charge with that rate; it depended on how much light they'd get during regular use.

"She /does/ like us!"

"I knew she was only pretending to be a grumpy-pants."

The four of them took a step closer; and I was abruptly in the middle of a four-fold hug that would have given any anime character a life-threatening nosebleed. One of them nibbled my ear, and whispered into it, "And if you want our /personal/ thanks..."

Another simply licked my other ear. "... Our next cycle is in just over a week."

"Right!" I exclaimed, and grabbed the chair's wheel-bars, pushing myself out of the crowd. "Lots to do, no time to waste, mind your teachers and do your homework, Brenda you're with me."

As I left the giggling behind me, I muttered, "I can't /wait/ for this place to become a republic..."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Four: Mis-guided*

With Brenda's help, I made it to Munchkin without getting taken further off-track, and we drove off to the nearest Royal Mail Canada office. I sent the letter off to Minerva, a very similar one to Captain Shatter, and a more clinical one to the Lake Erie embassy.

That brought me to the end of the high-priority items on my to-do list, and as I looked over the lower-priority ones, I grimaced a little, none of them particularly appealing at the moment. Amy had pointed out, every so often, that, every so often, I needed to do things that weren't /on/ a to-do list, to keep myself sane. I thought about torturing Brenda with the harmonica, or breaking out the watercolours and making a mess, or trying to teach Wagger how to not interfere when I walked.

In my private chamber, my gaze fell on a pile of papers - the ones filled out by the Bayesians who'd tried sheltering aboard. The top one was by 'Blue Wolf', mentioning his family heirloom, some sort of advice-giving, solar-powered ebony skull. That sounded weird enough that it caught my interest, so I chose to spend my off-time seeing if I could find out more.

The 'math club''s meeting place had been bombed out, and the city didn't have any phonebooks. Fortunately, I was already parked right at the Royal Mail, and was able to hire a telegram boy to go to the Professor to ask for Minerva's current address, where he asked for Blue Wolf's address, where he finally delivered my request for an informal meeting to learn about the skull, at a time and place of his choosing. The delivery boy, pedaling hard on his bicycle and panting but smiling, placed the return message into my hand: Now was good, and he suggested the Professor's warehouse.

Wolfy was in full robes and cowl, and with the Professor's good-natured permission, had made room for both of us in the office area, along with a wooden case of just the right size to contain a human head. "Your Majesty," he said, through his face-concealing cowl, "it is an honor and a pleasure to meet you."

"And you. This is it?" I nodded at the case.

"Yes, ma'am. Before I open it, I should warn you, that it behaves... strangely. My family have worked out a script to get it to be more cooperative, and how to keep it that way as long as possible. But it is touchy, so I ask that you and your, ah, griffon try to be quiet, or at least play along. You'll see what I mean."

"You make it sound intriguing. I'll try to be a good audience for the show."

Wolfy nodded, unlatched the box, and with both hands, pulled out, as expected, something black and skull-shaped. What his brief note hadn't mentioned were the crystalline teeth, or the patterns just on the edge of visibility etched into its surface.

He also hadn't mentioned that the eye-sockets could glow with red lights, which is exactly what they started to do.

"IN-sig-NIF-i-GANT WOOO-ooorms! What mortals dare disturb the astral meditations of Sargon the Sorcerer, Sargon the Great, Sargon the Mighty?"

I will admit that without Wolfy's warning, I probably would have snarked my head off at that particular bit of posturing.

Wolfy took a much more submissive tone. "Your eminence, this humble servant apologizes most profusely for disturbing your phylactery and returning your attention to the physical plane, but hopes your magnificent mind may find favour in being presented with new information and new challenges to solve."

"What is it this time, boy? More tinkering with mere mechanical devices in this base and de-magicked realm?"

"No, my lord. A teacher and potentate of these realms has heard of your knowledge, and come to seek an audience with you."

"Are you referring to the broken furry golem, or the slime with delusions of personhood?"

Wolfy made a quick gesture in my direction, which I took as a suggestion to start talking. "There are no... golems here," I told the skull. "I left my constructs in my... walking castle." That wasn't quite true, but I didn't see any need to mention Scorpia's potential for ambulation, or Boomer's conversational skills should I pull her out of my pocket and turn her on.

"If you /are/ alive, have you come to be healed of your infirmity?"

"I believe I can accomplish that myself, with time. I am simply a scholar, here to learn what I can, both from you and about you."

"And why should I waste any of my time dealing with such a pitiful specimen?"

Wolfy answered before I did. "She comes in all humility, leaving behind her wealth and retainers and position. Outside these walls, she is a head-of-state, a queen whose realm warred on this city, and conquered it, but in their generosity merely overthrew the corrupt madmen and are installing new nobility in their place."

"If she is a queen, why does she not seek to gain my favour with gold and jewels?"

Wolfy hesitated, so I jumped in, trying to twist my mind to match the framework this personality seemed to exist in. "True wealth and power lies not in mere physical possessions, but in being able to do as you wish, regardless of what you have. There seems to be little you wish for that gold and jewels could enable you to acquire."

An echoing laugh came from wherever it was inside the skull that its voice emanated from. "You amuse me, little queen, so I offer you a boon: solve three riddles, and I will answer any one question you may ask."

"That is... generous of you," I managed, "but while you would gain amusement from my mental struggles, I /am/ a queen, with queenly problems - not those involving the abstract and arcane aspects of the astral realms you meditate on."

"You DOUBT my COMPETENCE?"

"No - I doubt that I have the wit to ask you about anything I would understand about the astral, or anything about those parts of the physical world that still remain important enough to you for you to still remember."

"I am no nursemaid, to coddle the ignorant and uplift the unworthy. What DO you understand?"

"... That some ways of finding the truth work better than others, and how to find the difference."

"Is that ALL?"

"No, but it is what all the rest is based on."

"Out of all things that can be known, what is the one thing you WISH to know more than all others?"

"My first instinct is to say 'how not to die', but I've already died twice, and thanks to certain mere mechanical devices, I got better - without even having to place my vital essence in a separate container."

"Are you MOCKING me?"

"I am trying to understand you. To answer your last question... I suspect that what I most want to know is: What don't I know that I don't know?"

"You have a certain way with words, little queen, and your riddle is amusing, if simple. If you truly wish an answer to it, then bring my phylactery to the reproduction made of my original castle, lost a hundred fifty thousand-thousand years ago during the age of true magic; from where the sixth road meets the six hundred sixty-sixth, travel south to the sixty-sixth-"

Wolfy spoke up, "You need not spend your valuable time giving these directions, great one, as you have given them to this humble servant, who can give them to her."

"You DARE interrupt ME, insolent whelp?"

"No, my lord, I only sought to spare you-"

My walkie-talkie buzzed, which wasn't supposed to happen for anything short of an emergency. "Yes?" I asked, ignoring Sargon's sputtering outrage.

Sarah's voice came back, "The Free Company's back. They don't look happy. And they say they want to talk to you."

"Sorry, Sargon - matters of state outweighing simple conversation beckon. Unless one of the things I don't know that I don't know that you're willing to share right now involve how to deal with unruly mercenaries, I have to go."

"Such impertinent behaviour is an insult to-!"

Wolfy just about dropped Sargon into his box and latched the lid. "You might as well go," he said. "Once he starts going on about his castle, there's no getting him off the topic."

I started turning around to roll back towards Munchkin, Brenda and Wolfy following. "Does it really exist?"

"Maybe?" Wolfy shrugged. "His directions are to a spot in an old state park, about ninety miles southeast of here. The maps I've found say there used to be a prison there."

"You've never gone to look?"

"Not all of us have an armored land-train, lasers, and bodyguard robots to go exploring with."

--

I made use of my armored land-train, laser, and bodyguard robots to make as many preparations as I could for the parley, almost all of which were ones I tried to keep out of even potential sight of the Free Company's people. Coming up with further fallback plans, and exchanging radio messages with Sarah to set up various details, took up the time until the Company men arrived at the Lake Erie embassy. It might not have been neutral ground, but there were a number of ways to get out of there if one of the Company fellows turned out to have a gun hidden in a marsupial pouch or his biohazard suit lined with an unknown form of explosives or something. (Pinky even said that there was at least one escape route she wanted to not tell me about; so I added that to the plan list. Q, I think that one was.)

In yet another boring conference room, I waited at the head of yet another boring conference table, though I sat on a standard office chair with casters instead of a wheelchair. Brenda had reshaped and recolored herself in imitation of one of the potted plants, I had a couple of bun-bots to act as nurse and secretary, a squad of them in the room behind me, one of the alarm bracelets on my right ankle, filter plugs in my nostrils, anti-laser lenses in my glasses, Scorpia fully charged up, and a full load of hardware hidden inside my clothes (and my own equivalent of a marsupial pouch, Wagger's gullet). (After a few moments of thought, I asked Bun-Bun if she were able to grow a marsupial pouch that couldn't be seen. She didn't answer. I also asked if she could not turn off my adrenaline today, since I might need the boost.)

In short: I was feeling a little nervous.

Three figures wearing the gas masks and black body-suits I'd expected, and carrying some business-type briefcases I hadn't, were ushered in by the squiddies' translator, who stepped out of the room and closed the door. As they took their seats, I asked, "Would I have met any of you before?"

The one in the middle shook his head. "Captain Bravo was unavailable. I am Captain Alpha."

I nodded, to maintain politeness. "And what brings your people back to Erie, Captain?"

"We wish to offer bids for any and all city-killers, or related technologies, that are in your possession."

I blinked. "That is... unexpected. I have to say that I can't think of any offer you might make that I would accept, but I am quite happy to listen and discuss the matter. That is, unless the discussion degenerates into 'give us what we want or we'll invade' sorts of offers."

"That is not our intention today," said the Captain, and I had to repress a sigh at the last word in that sentence. He continued, "But I believe matters will not come anywhere near such an impasse. What we have to offer you is quite generous."

"You don't say," I said, mostly to fill the conversational gap.

"To begin with. While we believe that your stated intentions to prevent a second Singularity by researching the first are ill-advised, at best, we are willing to assist you in what you want in exchange for what we want. Our preliminary analysis is that your primary bottleneck is a lack of skilled manpower. The squiddies are unable to travel inland, the local education system is appalling, and you have been cut off from the Nine Nations and are on questionable terms at best with Technoville. We have university-level scientists in all fields, from traditional archaeology to even the computer sciences, who could be assigned to form the nucleus of your research group."

My eyebrows had risen fairly high during that, and when he finished, I looked away, at one of the walls, for a few moments. "Skilled people are rare," I acknowledged his point, "but skills can be taught. When dealing with such matters, what is even more important is trustworthiness - specifically, that the people can be trusted to handle such dangerous knowledge. I could only assume that such a group of people would remain loyal to your city over me, and that's without even starting to get into whether they would be up to treating a potential basilisk with the amount of respect it deserves, among other such issues."

"I see." He set one of the cases on the table, flipped open the latches with his thumbs. I tried not to tense, or for my breathing to hitch, just to remain in a state of fluid readiness. I probably didn't succeed, but I tried.

Captain Alpha pulled out a simple folder containing papers, which he flipped through. "We have a catalogue of a large number of zones, and a list of how their effects can be synergized. If there are any physical or biological transformations you seek, such as returning to your original form, we can very likely arrange for that to happen."

I tilted my head. "If you can do all that - why do you still have something resembling a human form? Surely there are all sorts of shapes that could provide a tactical advantage, which, if you can do all you can say you do, you can reverse after a tour of duty."

"We have a certain philosophical approach to such matters, which precludes voluntary personal transformations."

I looked away from him again, at the wall, considering, for the first time in a very long time, what it might be like to stop being a humanoid rabbit (plus various accoutrements), and get back to being a simple human. I thought of what I could do as a human... and then of what I could do with Bun-Bun's help. What I had done with her so far - among other details, that with a merely human liver and kidneys and so forth, I'd probably still be frozen while Denise looked for a way to bring me back to life. I thought, and I confronted a simple fact - on balance, I could do more good the way I was, then the way I had been.

I thought of Sarah and Jeff, who'd never asked to be foxtaurs; Brenda, who'd been Changed twice; and all the bimbofications. If all of /those/ could be reversed, that was a definite good. Then I thought of the Berserker being let loose, spreading its whispers, infecting any computers it came near, taking control of a war machine... there was a reason I didn't object to hearing it called a 'city-killer'. Similarly, my other possession that could be classified as that, the fusion reactor in Munchkin, which could be set to self-destruct...

I looked back at the envoys. "While you have, at least, suggested something that I could consider a net positive, I'm afraid, again, that handing over control of a city-killer is too high a price."

He shuffled papers, opening a new folder. "We have a factory-seed. We have been preparing to place it where the industry could be put to greatest use for us, but we could be convinced to site it at a location of your choosing, with further negotiations to decide what portions of its output would be put to internal expansion, to your products, and to our products."

"What sort of 'products'?"

"Shaped metal. Refined chemicals. Machinery. Vehicles. Farming equipment."

"Electronics?"

He hesitated, then said, "While within such a factory's capacity, and in fact, necessary for its own works, further negotiations would be required to be sure appropriate safety precautions surrounded such objects."

"Biologicals?"

"Not directly, but distillery equipment, lab equipment, certainly."

"Weapons of mass destruction?"

"We have no source of radioactive material, or diseases of the appropriate sort, or software of the appropriate sort."

"I notice you didn't mention a lack of chemicals."

"As I said, such a factory can produce arbitrary refining equipment, and most toxins do not require exotic elements."

"Hm." I looked away to think. It sounded a lot like the robo-fac I'd built Munchkin in. Which suggested that if I could dig the right November files out of the computer I'd salvaged from the place, I might be able to get the new factory-thing to make more of the fusion reactors. On the other hand, if that was possible, then the Free Company might also be able to make the exact same things - and self-destruct them near any hostile armies or cities.

I looked back at him. "Why haven't you already started making use of this factory-seed?"

"We already have a solid industrial base in Youngstown. A factory-seed is useful for reducing transport costs, but our areas of operations are compact enough that all our lines-of-transit are still short."

I tried to think of any obvious loopholes in what was being described. One was almost obvious: "How is it powered?"

"Initially, solar. It can continue expanding indefinitely on just sunlight, though its rate of production will be limited. For intensive manufacturing, you'll need hydro-power, windmills, bio-diesel; maybe even petroleum, if you know where to get some."

I drummed my fingers, frowning. "If that's all the case, that your industry is so good that you can trade away one of these seeds... why are you still using horse-drawn carts and don't already control this whole region with aircraft, rail lines, artillery, and so on?"

The two assistants (assuming that was what they were) glanced at each other. (Or, at least, they turned their gas-masks far enough where it looked like they might be able to see each other through their smoked-glass lenses.) Captain Alpha simply said, "Local energy sources can be found easily enough. But overall, they are thin on the ground, and transporting energy from where it is concentrated to wherever else it might be needed is problematic. Or, put another way, we could clear all the growths and monsters for any rail-line right-of-way we wish; we can't clear /all/ the rail-lines we might wish."

"Hm." I knew I wasn't an economist, and that if they started throwing numbers around, I could be bamboozled all too easily. But in general terms, it seemed... reasonable. "Depending on the specific details, I suspect that we could come to an entirely amicable arrangement of that nature... except for one complicating factor. I didn't expect you to make an offer good enough I'd even have to bring it up."

"Which factor is that?"

"I don't know you well enough to trust you with a technology capable of destroying a city. I don't even know what sort of government you have, let alone what social institutions you have to keep it in check; what your track record in interacting with your neighbours is; and, of course, I don't even know what any of you look like."

"Are you saying that you will not trade with us unless we remove our protective gear?"

"No. At least, not exactly. I'm talking about an accumulation of evidence of trustworthiness. Revealing your appearance could be part of that, but doesn't have to be. The more I learn about you, the more accurately I can predict - well, try to - what you'll do with any city-killers in your possession."

"I feel that I should mention that our main interest in acquiring all your city-killers is because of what we /do/ know about you."

"Is this about that state of war thing when you were hired to rescue me? Surely the fact that I /didn't/ use a city-killer is-"

He'd started shaking his head, so I trailed off. "Well before that, you have engaged in behaviour that is reckless beyond belief, endangering all who are near you. You created a long-distance communications network. Granted, using optical frequencies, a low bandwidth, and non-automated routing were a good start for safeguards, they are laughably inadequate for real protection. You use actual radios for short-range communication. Your personal vehicle is heavily computerized. You have made contact with at least one AI. All told, I can only attribute the fact that you have only been killed once, and even that reversibly, either to an unbelievable amount of luck, or to hidden support from one or more AIs that are using you for their own purposes. Neither of which are acceptable scenarios for leaving you with supposed control of city-killer-level technology."

"By any chance, if I suggested that 'not all AIs are bad', would you simply take that as further evidence of my being a pawn, as opposed to considering the statement on its merits?"

"Our data suggests you are culturally most familiar with twentieth-century North America?"

"... Near enough that I'm willing to agree to see where you're going with that."

"A simple analogy. 'Not all German soldiers in nineteen-forty are bad'."

"Ouch," I winced, then considered for a few moments. "Let's say that everything you say is completely true. That doesn't change the fact that humanity barely squeaked through the last Singularity, and we're facing an extinction risk should another happen. As best as I can figure, it's the largest extinction risk that we /do/ face. There are only so many possible ways to reduce that risk. Do you have better plans than I do for dealing with it?"

"Yes."

"Lovely! What are they?"

"Security reasons prohibit me from discussing them at this time."

I sighed. "That's all well and good for /you/, then. But it doesn't help /me/ rearrange my plans. I can work on improving my security measures, but I doubt that anything I can do in that regard would satisfy you."

"If you intend on continuing to closely interact with AIs, that is unlikely."

I snorted. "Sometimes it seems I can barely take a step without tripping over the things. I made first contact with one just this morning, housed in something shaped like a black skull."

"... Did it identify itself as Sargon?"

"You've met?"

"We have... encountered several copies of him before. Almost all of their behaviour is fixed and unchangeable, and they do not appear truly sapient, or to communicate other than audibly. They are toys, dangerous only in that they are stepping-stones to real dangers."

"Ah, so his - their - castle is a booby-trap?"

He didn't answer for a long moment. Then he stuck his hands into his case, where I couldn't see them, and fiddled for several more moments. I tensed again, but all that resulted were a couple of nods from his two fellows.

He folded his hands neatly before himself again, saying, "It occurs to me that your earlier phrase, 'accumulation of evidence', is a good one. We have accumulated next to no evidence that you have the capability of pursuing your stated research goals without self-destructing, messily, and in a way that may cause immense damage to those all around you. This is why we are willing to go to extensive measures to limit the damage you are capable of causing. It occurs to me that an exchange of evidence may be of benefit to both of us."

"I'm listening," I agreed, noncommittally.

"We are aware of the castle you mentioned, and are confident that it presents no special physical dangers. I propose that you provide us with evidence about your research skills by performing whatever examination of the site that you see fit, with one or more of us observing. Should you demonstrate ability beyond our current estimation, we will reciprocate by providing you with evidence we prefer to keep private about ourselves."

"Thus increasing my trust of you, and my willingness to hand over city-killer tech. ... And, I might as well say it, reducing the odds that you will be motivated to use measures more unpleasant than voluntary trade to remove that tech from my control. There's a lot of details that would have to be hammered out, but I have to say, I like your positive-sum approach."

"You accept the principle idea, then?"

"It makes a lot more sense than challenging me to cook up a spaghetti dinner, at least."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Five: Mis-manage*

The total population of the Royal Canadian Household in Munchkin was currently, if arguably, eight. I counted Bunny Joe as one person; while she'd brought along Bear Joe, I wasn't convinced that enough of Joe's mind had been stuffed inside his skull for him to be a full partner in the social contract's rights and responsibilities. Minerva, while a minor, was a fully human minor, with all the personhood and quirks that implied - such as bringing a pet, Toby Junior, to pet and play with to a formal meeting. Despite being twice the woman I was in many respects, Sarah only counted once. Denise probably didn't /want/ to be counted among our number, but was doomed to disappointment on many things. While Alphie was half-embedded in Brenda's chest, and served as her voicebox, I was counting them separately. And while Boomer had started with her software identical to Alphie's, or near enough, the facial expressions of their equine and mustelid avatars matched up so rarely that I couldn't help but treat them as separate individuals. And, finally, while I, myself, was one of the odder cases, until Wagger or Bun-Bun started expressing their own opinions on the issues of the day, I was willing to treat myself as being unanimous about my singular population count.

"Welcome to the first semi-formal meeting of what I'm calling the Private Council. Would everyone take a seat and settle in, please?

"Thank you. I don't want this to become some formalized ritual, where the order on the agenda is more important than dealing with actual problems; but I did want to get us all together for some announcements and discussion.

"First of all, I'm instituting a preliminary information security system. None of us are experts in the field, so we know going in that it's just going to be a temporary setup until we can work out something better, but I know I've been letting myself slip pieces of data to people who shouldn't have them. I think the downsides are much smaller than the upsides.

"I'm using Munchkin itself as the model, and color-coding it so it's easy to remember. White is outside Munchkin: information that's already public. Blue is the cargo car: stuff that we may not want publicized, but can be figured out by people watching us, such as any random people who we happen to rescue. Green is the living car, for people who we can trust at least enough not to stab us as we sleep. Yellow is the lab car, for materials that can be dangerous to those who don't know how to handle them. And red is my private car, for materials we don't want anyone else to get a hold of."

What I didn't add aloud was that, at least in my own mind, I'd added an extra category, black, for materials I didn't want anyone else to even know existed.

"These aren't hard-and-fast rules. They're meant to be guidelines. I expect I'm going to be spending some time sorting out which items and pieces of info go into which category. The general point is to avoid spreading information unnecessarily.

"The remainder of this meeting is coded Yellow, with possible exceptions.

"Any questions?"

--

"Next up. I have a proposal for a project, which I'm going to call 'Delver'. I've received information that ninety miles south-ish from here is a castle. I intend to go take a look at it, to see whether anything there can be made use of, up to and including claiming the site as a new headquarters; and to see if anything there is dangerous and needs to be disposed of, up to and including destroying the entire site.

"There are a few reasons to look at such a site. If I'm to do any digging into the Singularity, then it's a good idea to start getting some practice into practical archaeology. Getting the practice on a site that doesn't have any intrinsic importance, before a fumbled shovel might destroy an invaluable piece of data, seems worth the effort.

"There are also a few reasons to look at that site, as opposed to any others. The main one is to try to improve relations between us and the Free Company. They think we are, to put it bluntly, idiot children who can't be trusted with matches, let alone something really dangerous. I get the impression that if we don't give them what they want from us in a 'voluntary' trade, they'll take it by force. I'm also pretty sure that if they used force, none of my technical tricks would be enough to stop them. So I'm quite willing to try to play along with their ideas, as long as they continue to pose a looming threat.

"Because of that last goal, I'd like Delver to be done with all due caution and care, to try to impress any observers the Free Company has watching us. This means taking the time before leaving Erie to gather whatever information about the site and its environs that we can, getting as many of the potentially useful tools as we can build or buy, looking for any subject-matter experts we can hire, and so on. To this end, I'd rather not set a date to leave until we can make a good guess about how long it'll take to do all of that.

"At least one other thing to keep in mind is that, given how little we know about the Free Company, they have some sort of hidden agenda. Maybe they want someone else to clean out the castle so they can keep their hands clean. Maybe they're lying about the castle posing no physical danger, and whatever observers they send are expendable. Maybe they're playing with the definition of 'physical danger', and there's a mind-wipe zone inside or something. In short - nobody who's going is to let their guard down just because it's supposed to be a nice, easy training mission."

--

"Let's see... oh, yes. I've determined that there's a disease that's fairly widespread among Erieans, and whose main method of transmission is sexual contact. I'm still working out a way to determine if anyone is infected, but I have figured out a cure. Well, I suppose I should actually give credit to Clara for working out the cure. Anyway, it seems impolite to spread the disease more than it already has, so I'm going to request that you all consider taking the cure, and avoiding infectious contact with anyone who hasn't. It's two weeks of injections, which is annoying, so I'll understand if you don't want to. If it makes you feel any better, I've already started taking the treatment myself."

--

"Moving along; I'd like to make some longer-term arrangements to keep Human Joe frozen, other than inside Munchkin. For one, he's in the way in case anyone else needs to be preserved. For another, it would be better for him to be in a fixed location. I propose we find some industrial space to serve as storage space for his cryostat, while looking for a building that would be suitable for the longer term. I'd like to suggest we pass along this task to the local Bayesians, some of whom were already working on a similar project before their space got blown up. ... I suppose we should make a note to avoid publicizing the location of the cryo-storage space, in case anyone else takes it into their mind to apply explosives."

--

"I don't expect this item to be resolved today, but I do want to bring it up. The odds that I'm going to get killed by something in the near future are non-negligible. And that doesn't even take into account the various ways I could end up hors de combat, such as a zone mind-wipe that makes me want nothing more than to be a tree, or something. I'm positioning this whole monarchy job as being working on long-term problems that a regular political process is ill-equipped to handle... and I want those problems handled, even if I'm not around to handle them.

"I don't expect to be able to reproduce in anything like a natural fashion - and even if I could, waiting fifteen to twenty years for someone new to even start working on the problems isn't a good solution. But I still want something resembling an heir, who can take the resources I've gathered so far and put them to good use. The people who seem most likely to be willing and able to get to work on existential-risk reduction are the ones in this room. I know not all of you have the interest or skills to even try - but I'd like each of you to start thinking about what it would mean to try taking on that sort of responsibility."

I paused for effect, looking around at each face.

"There's a certain mindset involved in thinking that your long-term goal is so important that it's worth doing almost anything, or even just plain anything, to accomplish. I'm hoping to cultivate that mindset in each of you. To start with, I remembered the names of a few pieces of text that might provide relevant advice, and Clara was able to find copies somewhere in her library, or maybe students' personal data storage devices - she just said she found 'em. I'm handing out copies of 'The List of Character Survival Techniques' as an introduction, and when you're done with that, I'd recommend the 'Evil Overlord List' and its sequels, and 'Murphy's Laws of Combat'. I'm paying the heliographers to transmit further items during their usual down-times, starting with selected articles from 'Dragon Magazine', as well as excerpts from the 'Grimtooth's Traps' line for practical puzzles to ponder how to pass."

--

"Bunny Joe, Sarah, could you stay behind for a minute?

"I'm calling this piece of info red level of security. I've written up a simple set of documents to serve as a will, living will, and the like, in case of my death or incapacitation. Among other details, they name my current choice of heir. I've used a bit of encryption mathematical trickery on them, splitting them into three pieces, any two of which can be used to recreate the original documents. I'm storing one piece aboard Munchkin, entrusting one piece to the Lake Erie squiddies, and transmitting the third piece to Clara to hold in trust for the Quebecois, until we get back in touch with them again."

--

"Candy? Crystal? Kelly? Karma? I have a proposition for you. At the moment, you are security level blue. I am willing to consider that to security level green - if you can do something for me.

"There is something called 'decision fatigue'. Making lots of little decisions makes it harder to make the big decisions. I know some politicians have tried to reduce that for themselves by simplifying their lives - reducing their wardrobe to just a blue suit or a grey one. If you can come up with ways to reduce /my/ decision fatigue... I'll probably let you."

"Among other benefits, if you do so, I will grant you access to one of my buns, who has the same measurements and range of motion as me. You will be able to learn a great many things about me from it, so it will be a further extension of my trust to you."

--

"I would like to apologize for neglecting my diplomatic duties to you and your people, Captain Shatter."

"Not at all. We are delighted to... observe the local forms of... inter-state relations, and in particular... your resolution to your conflict with... the locals. We have never witnessed... the writing of a constitution... before."

"Ah, that's why you haven't set sail yet. Hm... in that case, do you think you might be willing to have a few of the people under your command join me in a little expedition inland?"

--

"Mister... Lee, is it?" I double-checked my itinerary.

"Yes, Your Majesty. Former manager of Erie Pharamaceuticals. Current manager of Royal Canadian Pharamaceuticals, Erie Branch, until such time as you choose to replace me."

"I have little to no interest in interfering in the day-to-day operations of your group, outside of ensuring there's an ombudsman who everyone can report any problems to. I have asked you here for two reasons, the first of which is that I wish to ensure that, as a Crown company, your company's actions do not negatively affect the reputation of the crown."

"We use all available testing methods to ensure the purity and potency of our products. I have also brought samples of the new branding materials for your inspection and review."

"Would it be safe to assume that the workers are fully unionized?"

"Of course, ma'am."

"Then from what I see so far, there are no major issues to deal with. Which allows me to proceed to my second reason for bringing you here: arranging to supply the Royal Mobile Household with medicines and other such interesting chemicals, which are infeasible to create in our private lab. Improving the equipment and resources in that lab would also be nice."

--

"No, vodka does /not/ contain enough alcohol by volume for my needs. I don't want to drink it, I want to burn it. Diesel would work about as well, but seems to be hard to come by, while I /know/ that if technology is advanced enough to make pipes, people are going to be using those pipes to distill alcohol. If you can't provide me what I need with a deliverable of two days, then please let me know now, so I can come up with an alternative solution."

--

"Mayor Edwards, it occurs to me that one area of information my current records are woefully lacking in are post-Singularity maps. I would greatly appreciate your advice in recommending libraries, whether public or private, from which I can remedy this deficiency."

--

I looked up from the article on exploring abandoned architecture, and spoke to myself, "Why haven't I set the mini-fabber to make a ladder yet? ... I suppose getting paws, then a hoof, then a spinal injury, then a tail with veto control over my legs, has kind of made climbing things low on my priority list... I suppose I should make sure I've got a good selection of ropes, too, a few grappling hooks, some sort of collapsible ten-foot pole... I wonder how Sarah would feel about an actual saddle? Hm... no need to limit myself to the classics; I've got compressed air, I wonder if Clara knows an easy way to make silly string? ... Wherever did I put that smart-metal lariat?"

--

"Yes, Brenda?"

"I've been trading 'grams with Clara. Told her as much as we know about what I'm made of now. Got instructions back to test me for that disease, and treat me if I've got it. She says as long as I stick to the plan, you don't have to worry about catching anything from me!"

"That's... nice."

"And I've been practicing with your bun-bots! I can make any of them look like they're wearing any of your outfits now! Well, except I have to have enough of me there so I can think. They're very stretchy inside, even more than you!"

"Er..."

"... Or I can pretend to be a backpack, or something like that. Oh, and I've been working on my tentacles! Anybody tries to get into a fight with you, they won't know what hit them!"

"Well..."

"And I've just started trying to make myself look like you. If you need a body-double, that can talk better than the bun-bots, and react to new things, I can fill in for you! Fur's kind of hard for me, though."

"Brenda, I'd prefer it if you didn't try to look like me - there's a lot of potential for dangerous confusion there. I'd also prefer if we finished this conversation when I finished showering."

"Ooh, what's that? Do you have another giant egg in there?"

"... No, it's not my uterus. Apparently growing a flap of skin doesn't take Bun-Bun very long, and I'm seeing how big my new marsupial pouch can get by filling it with water."

"It looks as big as when I was in you!"

"..."

"Is that for /me/? You didn't know I was talking to Clara, so you changed yourself so I could be in you and not worry about that disease and eeee and can I try it now?"

"... Have you checked to see if you dissolve in water? I don't think even you'd survive the recycler..."

--

"Hello, Miz... Unruh?"

"That's right."

"In charge of Royal Mail Canada's heliograph system and telegraph delivery service?"

"That's right."

"I am planning on making a trip to a site about a hundred fifty klicks from here. I'd like your opinion on the feasibility of creating a temporary heliograph line between here and there, and what impact that might have on your normal operations."

--

Present at the latest Munchkin meeting were myself; Joe, Sarah, Brenda, Denise; a couple of Free Company observers; a squad of red-shirted Acadian marines; a heliograph operator team; Blue Wolf and Sargon in his box; and some bun-bots.

I'd at least learned enough about how these things went to have made arrangements for the right numbers and types of seats and refreshments.

"Welcome, everyone, to the first meeting for Project Delver. Some of you will be joining me on the expedition; some of you will be remaining here, but contributing in other ways.

"I will be issuing keycards to each of you shortly, which you will be able to use to access the parts of Munchkin that it is safe for you to do so. When I do, you will need to choose an additional security measure, such as a thumbprint or passcode, so that a stolen keycard will not be of use to a thief.

"Project Delver's first goal is for everyone involved to return in one piece. The second goal is for anyone who ends up in less than one piece, to be given the best treatment possible as quickly as possible. The third goal is to end up with the maximum possible amount of valuable resources, including both information and materiel.

"The basic plan is to travel to Site F aboard Munchkin, dropping off temporary heliograph relays on the way; to investigate the Site for useful and dangerous things, hopefully ending up with at least a preliminary examination of the entire Site; and to return to Erie, picking up the heliographs and their crews on the way. Given the second goal, Plan B is if someone is injured beyond what can be treated on-site, to bring them back to Erie's hospital as fast as possible, and then to return to collect everyone who was left behind. Plan C is if the Site turns out to have significant immobile resources and insignificant dangers, to establish a longer-term base to exploit those resources, and to minimize the odds of them from being exploited or destroyed by hostile groups.

"Part of this meeting is to gather any suggestions any of you may have in improving those plans, or in preparing alternate ones.

"This meeting is also, in part, so everyone involved can start familiarizing themselves with each other, and with the tools we'll be using. For example, this, here, is Pole-Bun, as in 'polish mine detector'. Despite her resemblance to me, she is not, in fact, a person; and thus she can be sent to walk ahead of a real person, to check for stable footing and a lack of things that will fall on heads. While I don't want to lose Pole-Bun, I'd rather lose her than a real person.

"I have also prepared one of my flying machines for a demonstration today, to see which, if any, of you might be interested in learning how to be a backup pilot. I'm sure all of you can imagine the benefits of getting a higher perspective on things."

--

One of the lynx-shaped soldiers padded over and asked, "Will any of the citizens of the Dominion of Lake Erie be contributing to this project?"

"No more than to any other, I'd imagine," I said. "Site F is inland, away from Lake Erie's shores. If it were in the same drainage basin, then I might have asked if they had anyone who might be willing to swim upstream; I don't know how they might be able to help, but I'd ask. But if I have to help them get over the hump to the next stream over, then by the time any of them could make it through all the twists and turns of the local river system to anywhere near Site F, we're probably already going to be done exploring the place."

"Could you not bring even one in Munchkin?"

"I've asked, but they don't seem interested. I suppose if we come across something at Site F in which an aquatic, tentacled sapient being would tremendously help, then I can use the heliograph line to send a message back negotiating for the help of one, and have Munchkin make a quick trip back and forth to bring one."

--

"And here we are at Site Mock-F."

"It's a barn," said Observer Charlie.

"Not a very big one," said Observer Delta.

"On the outside, sure," I agreed. "But better to find out how we step on each other's toes at a barn, next to Erie and its medical establishment, than a few hours away. I've got the heliograph operators practicing their craft elsewhere, so at this point in the simulated expedition, we've gotten near Site F. I've gone up, taken some pictures, and come back down. Well, Joe, Sarah, Wolfy, it appears that our intelligence was faulty, and instead of a castle, we are faced with a simple barn. Whatever shall we do?"

Bunny Joe tilted her head. "Blow it up?"

"Explosives are kind of expensive these days."

Sarah suggested, "Move in?"

"We haven't seen the inside - it may be a monster-barn fake castle thing."

Blue Wolf said, "Then I guess we'd better take a look. Should we send Pole-Bun in first?"

"We should," I agreed. "And now that I think about it - I'd really like to be able to see what she sees, without risking /any/ of our people. Boomer, add to the session notes, I want to look into really, /really/ long video cables. Also, since I haven't actually flown - if I can put together a simple surveillance drone, so I don't have to risk my own neck in case the real thing has some sort of anti-air defenses. Now, while we're standing here gabbing, what should the marines be doing? That barn might be full of robo-centaur knights getting ready to sally out against us; how should we have already arranged ourselves in case of such a situation?"

--

"... 'Presbylutheran'?" I read from the pamphlet.

"There weren't many people left after the Singularity. Almost all of the old churches with enough members left to even be called a church merged," said Edwards.

"You do realize that I'm not a Christian of any shape or sort, right?"

"Powerful people can be religious. And this is an area of influence outside the usual inter-union squabbling."

"And why are /you/ suggesting /I/ engage in this area at all?"

"Maybe because I want to keep my cushy job as secretary once the new constitution is in place, and the church's support would go a long way to keeping things stable. Or maybe I just want to watch you squirm uncomfortably."

"... Or maybe you owe someone a favor. Fine, I'll talk to the priest. Or reverend, or bishop, or pastor, or whatever the title is. But if I burst into flames when I walk in the doors, I'm holding you responsible."

--

The harem were... trying. They'd found pictures of Queen Elizabeth on walkabout, and had imitated the fashion, with knee-length skirt and wide-brimmed hat, in royal blue. Since they hadn't been bothering me at all while they'd put that together, I didn't want to discourage their approach, so I took the ensemble they presented me with back to my private room, scanned it into the clothes fabber, and had it re-make the outfit - with the addition of my usual selection of hidden pockets. I tucked Boomer into my new marsupial pouch, padded her case's corners with a few hankies and a microfiber towel, and picked a cane to try to walk with that day. (Wagger finally seemed to be responding to the operant conditioning of 'twitch leg at bad time, Bunny falls onto tail', but it wasn't a deeply embedded lesson yet.)

In relatively short order, I was welcomed into a small house behind a white-painted church. (Rectory? Parsonage? There was a whole vocabulary I was missing, and had little interest in spending my time to assimilate.)

"May I offer you some tea? Wine?" asked the woman, with the sort of collar I'd seen on TV often enough to recognize as being some sort of indicator of ministership.

"No, thank you," I settled into a seat. I added an explanation, "I've started to have some medical issues with locally-sourced food and water." It wasn't /entirely/ false, and I hoped helped move the conversation along.

"It's a shame you couldn't make it to services, earlier."

I sighed. "Ma'am - with all due respect, you're not going to convert me to any brand of theism, I'm not going to convert you to any variation of atheism, and I'm pretty sure we both have better things to do than waste our time trying. If that's all you asked me over for, I should probably just leave."

"While it grieves me to see any soul as lost in the wilderness as yours, there is another reason you are here. What are your intentions towards the church in your new government?"

"'My' new government? You mean Erie's new government?" At her nod, I said, "You should take that up with the new government, not me. I'm just making sure it meets certain minimal standards. After that, I have no intentions for it, or anything under its bailiwick."

"Do those standards include freedom of religion?"

"They include a bill of rights, which I won't consider complete without some sort of guarantee for freedom of thought and expression. There are certain limits to that guarantee, such as someone who believes that they can cure their child by starving it in the face of all medical evidence to the contrary, but the old American government was perfectly able to include 'reckless endangerment' laws within its constitution and still have lots of churches."

"And what will you do if the new government fails to abide by that guarantee?"

"Me? Almost certainly nothing. That's what elections, emigration, and revolutions are for. I'm not here to solve all the world's problems; I'm not here to solve /your/ problems. If I can solve the one problem I'm focused on with a guarantee of free religion, I'll work on that guarantee. If I can solve the one problem I'm focused on by establishing atheism as the one and only state church, I'll work on establishing that."

"I'm not happy to hear that."

"Then think of it this way. If there's anything you can do to help me on my problem, I'll be quite happy to offer whatever I can in return, commensurate to the size of your help."

"And what 'problem' is that?"

"From your perspective? Ensuring that enough people survive, in the long term, so that there is a reasonable chance of your church continuing to exist. I'm not going to say that if you're really interested in the long-term welfare of your flock that you should throw your total support behind me, because people generally just don't think that way."

--

"How's progress, Skunk?"

"We resolved the populism versus unionism debate along with the separation of law bills and money bills by going back to bicameralism. One house, elected by single transferable vote, initiates law bills, requires a two-thirds majority to pass any, laws require a simple majority of the other house."

"Is 'single transferable vote' a synonym for 'instant runoff'?"

"Not quite. The person doing the voting still just ranks their candidates in order of preference, but since it's to elect a bunch of people into a group instead of an individual, if everybody's first vote is for X, then the excess votes go to their second choice."

"I'll read up on it when I have a chance. Go ahead, then."

"The other house has its members appointed by the union leaders, initiates money bills, the executive gets a line-item veto, bills can be defeated by a supermajority of the first house. Right now, we're working on tweaking the Bill of Rights to take into account the abuses and excesses of the Civil Guard, and the previous government in general. I'm pushing for a separate branch of government for ombudsmen, but I could live with them being part of the executive, if enough other measures are taken. When I get back, the plan is to discuss whether we want to constitutionally enshrine the pre-twenty-twenty-seven exclusionary rule and the principle of throwing out the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' for illegally-gathered evidence, or stay within the American legal tradition, incorporate Doe v. Alabama as precedent, and come up with other ways to punish government agents who exceed their lawful authority."

"I'm not really familiar with that case, or what happened in twenty-twenty-seven."

"I'm not an expert in the details, but the previous rule was ruled unconstitutional. After, if someone felt that a search was illegal, they were supposed to file a writ of habeas corpus to get an immediate hearing. However, in practice, it was nearly impossible to succeed. As police already had qualified immunity from lawsuits, only being liable for clear violations of peoples' rights, they had nearly free reign. Thus the creation of the Civil Guard instead of a police force, to avoid those abuses."

"... I'm going to think that it didn't avoid them very well."

"Perhaps not, but it was a step in the right direction, and the main problems lay elsewhere in the system. Given the terms of the surrender document, I'm implying to the committee that anything less than every civil rights protection we can come up with could be insufficient to satisfy you, but I'm also trying to get them to understand why the protections are valuable in and of themselves."

"Pointing out how the Civil Guard, or whatever, is at least as likely to be pointed at them as at random civilians seems like one approach."

"Perhaps, but given the backgrounds of the committee members, they simply don't have the context to understand what that's like. I'm getting tempted to spend a day forcing all of them to dress up like poor people and get hassled."

"... I'm almost tempted to extend the deadline by a day if you do, but changing that, even for such a noble cause, would likely set a bad precedent..."

--

"I'd like everyone working on Project Delver to wear these. They're not directly related to the project, but are more for long-term data gathering."

Sarah picked up the pen-shaped object, then the card-sized one. "What do they do? More radio gear?"

"No, a couple of types of radiation detectors. Without decent sources of semiconductors or noble gasses, I'm limited in the sensors I can build. But the local newspaper has photos, so I was able to get some film to build a film-badge dosimeter. And the quartz fiber dosimeter doesn't require any special materials, it just needs to be read off and recharged every so often. Recharger's in the lab, along with a logbook and instruction sheet."

"Are you /expecting/ radiation at the castle?"

"I have no reason to. But I'm hoping the castle expedition is a prelude to bigger and better investigations, and I'd feel downright silly if I discovered the secrets of the universe, but died because I found them in the middle of a particle accelerator I didn't know was active."

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Six: Mis-lead*

We made it all of twenty miles out of Erie before we had to turn around and head all the way back.

I'd let Miz Unruh make the arrangements she thought best for the heliograph camps, trusting that she knew her job and what was best for her people so I could focus better on the castle end of the trip. It was only as everyone pitched in to help set up the first relay that I discovered she'd made absolutely no provisions to get her people back if Munchkin broke down. So we drove back to Erie, grabbed just about every loose bicycle that was for sale or rent, and enough backpacks to hold provisions for stranded heliograph operators bicycling back home, and /then/ went on the road again.

I chose to think of the whole thing as being quite fortunate, if it was the worst blunder we made. I spent most of the trip going back and forth in Munchkin looking for any worse blunders.

--

We took an old 'Penny Rail' line, east from Erie through the ruins of the cooling towers that were all that was left of Corry, Youngsville (not the Youngstown the Free Company was from), Warren, and to Cane, where we switched to a B&O Rail line heading southwest to Marienville - paralleling the non-rail Route Sixty-Six, and, according to the relevant maps, passing right through the frontage of the ex-prison we were aiming for.

Naturally, we didn't get anywhere near that close before we got a look at the place. While I didn't want to risk Alphie or Boomer by sending them into the air, it wasn't too hard to send a hastily cobbled-together quadcopter straight up to check for a Toronto-like air defense system, and when it wasn't shot down, to make a quick flight in one of the powered paragliders. Each time we stopped to drop off a heliograph, I went up a few hundred feet, circled around so Boomer, strapped on my chest, could get a good view, and glided back down.

After we passed Kane, we were going through an old national forest, so there wasn't much to see... until we were less than twenty klicks away. When I landed, Sarah, Bunny Joe, and I put our heads together to peer at Boomer's small display, with Brenda and Blue Wolf hanging back until we made room.

I said, "If I said 'Enhance', would it do any good?"

Boomer's voice came over the vague three-dimensional blob she was rotating. "I am already using all the enhancement algorithms I have in my memory, including ones which take advantage of my accelerometers to know my position when each frame of video was taken, the exact details of the camera's construction-"

"Okay, okay," I cut her explanation off, "it's already enhanced. It's just... a lot more /rounded/ than most castles I'm used to seeing. Is that an artifact of the enhancement?"

"No, the structure possesses that shape. The highest portion is roughly twenty meters above the ground level recorded in topographic maps for that site, while the portion I am highlighting is roughly seventeen meters."

Sarah asked, "Maybe it used to be straighter and taller, and is just ruins now?"

Bunny Joe said, "Maybe it was built in the shape of ruins."

I tapped my lips with one finger, as I thought. "Maybe we can get a better look before we get any closer... Give me a couple of minutes, and I should be able to whip up a mount to aim Boomer's best camera through a telescope."

--

We gathered around Boomer again.

"Okay," said Sarah, "so it's a giant stone lion. That's called a sphinx, right?" The figure was roughly forty meters long from nose to the base of its tail (if it had one), facing west, crouched on its belly as if getting ready to pounce onto the road.

"Not quite," I commented, "sphinxes have human heads. Boomer, can you extrapolate more of the shape by assuming it's at least roughly symmetrical?"

"I can," she said, and did. "I should also note that while the trees and limited number of frames are blocking almost all of my view of ground level, the figures appears to be resting on a mound roughly ten feet above local ground level. In addition, as I zoom out, I can confirm at least part of a wall surrounding the structure, roughly ten feet tall, five feet wide, with multiple twenty-foot towers."

"I'm getting some serious deja vu," I frowned. "Maybe it was that giant cat that chased me around, over near Technoville? Can this thing get up and move?"

"I have insufficient data to answer that question."

"I could swear I've seen that before... did someone try recreating the Giza sphinx, with a lion's head?

"The height is similar, but none of the other dimensions appear to be a close match."

"Any records of any similar structures?"

"Not in my database. Would you like to query Clara?"

"... You know, we might as well. Make a good test of the heliograph line."

Soon, beams of light were being reflected over nearly four hundred kilometers, from Munchkin through Kane via Erie to Buffalo and finally to Brock University. With only a light code, to keep the heliograph operators from knowing what I was talking about but without making their jobs too hard, I transmitted, "At site of castle, found a giant stone lion. I think I remember it, but don't remember where." I summarized what we'd found so far. "Any insights?"

Her return message came quickly. "ISBN 978-0880381079. Authour: Merle M. Rasmussen. Title: Ghost of Lion Castle. Publication date: 1984. Source: Product listings in the role-playing magazines you have been requesting excerpts of. As there is no record of the authour's death, the text appears to still be under copyright. A digital copy is available to be checked out of the library."

I sent, "I am currently unable to visit the library. How much information can you send on this communications medium? Is there such a thing as a digital interlibrary loan?"

I got back, "Current university policies do not support digital loans. Information on texts is limited to that necessary for reviews, such as one article per periodical."

"How much are you able to transmit about the building described in that book? Preferably focusing on dangers to people exploring it."

"Many monsters wander the premises. When invaded by more than one individual at a time, intruders are transformed into beasts. Portcullises fall when walked under. Murder holes drop stones when walked under. Molten lead pours from nostrils when walked under. Glowing arrows fire out of arrow slits. Traps exist in the Treasury room, Butcher room and the Mason room."

Instead of immediately responding, I showed the conversation's transcription to the rest of the team. "I had dozens, maybe hundreds, of 'adventure modules' like that in my personal library, before the first time I died," I said. "This book was probably one of them. From what I gathered before we left Erie, the AIs think the place was a prison right up to the Singularity, so... what do you think?"

Sarah said, "If the real thing is like the book, it sounds like there's a transformation zone, maybe lots of them."

Bunny Joe commented, "I do not think any one person, or even one family, could build something that large. And there is no sign of any larger settlements nearby to provide the labour. I do not think it was made by human hands, even if humans came up with the design."

I nodded. "Maybe the Free Company was lying about no dangers, and they're hoping one or more of us get Changed. Or, maybe there are zones here that are more about mental changes than physical. Or, of course, we're still completely missing the gag. Whatever the answer is, I think nobody will object if I rule that nobody goes anywhere unless a bun-bot's been through there first?"

--

We came to a halt a little over a klick from the site at what the old maps showed as a road-salt depot, and which was now just a small clearing that trees didn't seem to want to grow in. I asked, "Any change in the weather forecast?"

Blue Wolf was idly fiddling with the latch on the wooden skull's box, but answered, "Still looks the same - partly cloudy until at least sunset, but could be rain tomorrow."

"That's going to play hob with the heliograph ranges," I mused. "We can always go back to Erie and redeploy on another day - the castle's not going anywhere. Still, no reason not to gather what info we can while the helio's still up."

Sarah tilted her head. "We're not going right in, are we?"

I shook my head in a negative. "I'm thinking of taking the 'glider and circling the site, get a view from all angles. First, though, there's Goal One to consider - what do we do if something goes wrong, or the place really does shoot glowing arrows, and I crash? There aren't many roads in the area."

Bunny Joe suggested, "Have someone on the roof watch you fly. If you fall, they can see where you land, and we can come get you."

After a bit more discussion, mostly ideas being shot down for not being as good as the first one, we started getting ready for that. "Acadians, you're in charge of physical security, in case of monsters or bandits. Free Company Observers, you, er, observe. Bunny Joe, you've got good eyes; you're on rooftop duty. Sarah, I'm designating you Munchkin's pilot for the duration. Brenda, you can nap in my quarters to keep from bothering everyone while they work. I'm going to grab a different outfit, and double-check my medkit and so on."

Brenda, who was back to pretending to be a 'service griffon' in front of the Free Company, and I went back to my private car. She pushed Alphie out of the surface of her chest, and through him, said, "I should go with you, not nap."

"I agree, but if you want to keep up your cover story, you need to be somewhere plausibly out of sight. Here's the freezer for your excess mass, and here's my flight suit for you to imitate, and here's a belly-pack that can explain why I'm carrying extra mass on my front."

"Aren't you getting undressed? I'm going to be your clothes!"

"And if we need to split up? Shorts and a t-shirt shouldn't interfere with you looking like my outer layers, should they?"

She grumbled, but went transparent and started sliding around me, and into the marsupial-like pouch I was still getting used to having. I set Alphie aside for the moment - no need to risk both AIs - and once Brenda had covered me enough, held Boomer to my chest for her to grab onto. Once I had a layer of Brenda-stuff covering my whole body from the neck down, she went to work on the colours and textures, until, for all anyone else could tell, I was wearing a full-body jumpsuit.

Boomer said, in Brenda's voice, "Do you want the tail covered or uncovered?"

"Eh," I shrugged as I took a few steps to get used to the new distribution of weight, "doesn't matter much. Maybe leave her head free, and make a sleeve for the rest."

So I had spoken, so it was done. "Sure you don't want a hood?"

I swapped out my glasses for a pair of goggles, on the theory they were less likely to get lost. "Can you make yourself into a helmet?"

"I'm made of goo. I can fiddle with my surface so it's dry and not sticky, but not that hard."

"Then no hood. If I /do/ fall out of the sky, then feel free to do whatever you can to keep my skull from getting squashed, like turning into a bunch of pillows to slow down the stop when I hit the ground. Oh, and do as much for my torso as you can without increasing the risk to my head. Bun-Bun's pretty good with limbs, so don't worry about them much."

--

I circled clockwise around the castle; /well/ around the castle, to avoid anything short of a sniper or laser. East from Munchkin, curving around to the south, getting a view of the stone lion from all sides, including giving Boomer a view through the telescope every so often. I saw a few things I wanted to turn closer in to get a better look at, but just because I'd made lots of plans in case of a crash didn't mean I /wanted/ to crash.

I landed without incident on the road, packed up my chute, and boarded Munchkin. Before I could head back to my room to let Brenda take up a separate embodiment again, Wagger gave my legs a twitch and I just about fell onto a couch. Sarah handed me a mug of hot something-or-other, and Bunny Joe was clambering down from the roof, and everybody was crowding closer to ask what I'd seen, so I gave a mental sigh, hoped Brenda wouldn't object to being literally objectified for a while longer, and set down Boomer so at least a few of us could get a look at her screen.

I asked her, "Need any processing time to put together a new 3D model?"

Boomer answered, "If I had been built with technology from twenty-fifteen, perhaps. I was not, so no." She started displaying the whole landscape on her screen, slowly rotating it around and around, and highlighting various points. "Access to the main structure from the ground appears difficult. The wall surrounds the whole building, and there is a two-meter-deep ditch just outside it. The ditch is broken in two places: the middle of the east wall, where the gate is sealed with a portcullis, and this tower in the north wall, where the tail of the lion leads to, which appears to be sealed with wooden doors. Comparing the site to previous maps, the entire footprint of the previous prison grounds has been flattened, and that area is surrounded by a vehicular road, surrounded by trees. That road is connected to a driveway reaching to Route Sixty-Six, passing by a parking lot and this building here."

Sarah pointed a claw-tip at the latter. "What is this place? A guardhouse?"

Boomer obligingly zoomed in, and above a set of glass doors, and below some panels of black glass on the rooftop I guessed were solar panels, were the words, 'Tourism Office'.

I grunted, and asked the obvious question, "Are there any /other/ bits of writing in the area?"

Boomer's virtual camera obligingly flew over to a gate where the driveway met the main road, over which was a sign reading, "Welcome to Lion Castle". A second sign was stuck into the ground to the right of the higher one, this one reading, "Pennsylvania's premiere LARP and paintball destination!"

Sarah said, "Well, that just looks... cheap."

I frowned, and asked, "You're sure there's no hint of this place existing before twenty-fifty?"

Boomer responded, "None at all."

I considered. "Well - the whole place looks secure enough against anything short of an army, and there aren't many of those around. If there aren't any zones to worry about, I might not mind setting up shop here... with a few renovations to make the entrance a little less tawdry. On the other paw, the only reason I can think of to build something that looks like a tourist trap is as, well, a trap, to get people who wander by to lower their guard and wander in."

Joe asked, "If something could build all that, what would they need to trap people for?"

I shrugged. "Maybe it's trying to recreate the original adventure, and needs live bodies to turn into monsters? Personally, I'd rather not spend the rest of my days as an orc guarding a chest in a ten-by-ten-foot room. So how about we start finding out if that's a possibility, drive closer, and send a few bun-bots to walk around that tourist office while the light's still good?"

--

We drove up to the driveway, and I sent a trio of the robots shaped like me (not counting my Brenda-bulge) out to walk through the gate. With a bit of help from the gang, I'd worked out a precise set of instructions for them to follow. (Natural language computer programming was a lot easier than having to translate everything into absolutely precise terms; and it was a lot more acceptable to the local technophobes if I avoided calling it 'programming' and just called it 'telling them what to do'.)

I wanted to watch everything going on in real-time, but with all the trees, the office was out of sight of the road. I checked the 'glider's fuel, dithered a bit, and decided to conserve it by waiting.

After five minutes, the first bun-bot came back, indicating nothing had eaten any of them, and drawing a map of where she'd walked so far; so I sent her back to continue the exploration. At ten and fifteen, the other two returned as they were supposed to. And at twenty, the first one came back again - but this time, she also reported that the doors she'd been told to try to open were unlocked.

After a quick huddle of the gang, we sent her to explore inside the building, as well as the second bun-bot when she returned, while leaving the third to continue checking the exterior.

After a while of this, the bun-bots reported they'd walked through the entire building, so I sent one back to retrieve the third, and looked at the people around me. "So far, so good," I said. "If there are any zones in the area, they don't seem to be in that building."

Sarah said, "Or if there is one, it can tell the difference between people and bun-bots."

Bunny Joe added, "Or maybe it ignores rabbit people."

"All of which are very good maybes," I acknowledged. "So, does anyone want to volunteer to look at the place?" After a few seconds, I rolled my eyes. "Or maybe we should just stick to rabbit people to start with?" I looked at Joe, who looked back calmly. I gave a quick sigh, then said, "Lemme go grab something more appropriate than a flight suit."

Back in my private car, I patted my belly. "You can come out, now, get back to griffon shape again. Or, now that I think of it, whatever other shape you want to be - we're in private, so you don't have to pretend to be an animal if you don't want to."

I didn't feel any motion of her sliding out of my pouch, or from my limbs. Through Boomer, she said, "You're walking into a place that might be dangerous. You don't have to worry about falling, but I can help you more like this than waiting for you in Munchkin."

"Maybe," I agreed, "but there's a whole lot we don't know about how you work yet. If there is a zone that wants to turn me into a bugbear... you might just be used as raw biomass, and, well, die."

"And if you trip and fall into a refuse pit, or a support beam breaks, or all sorts of other things happen, you'll die unless I'm there to help."

I drummed my Brenda-gloved fingers on my work-desk as I thought. "By the obvious extension of that logic, I shouldn't ever take you off."

"I could live with that."

"I'm not sure I want to be permanently pseudo-pregnant."

Her mass finally started to shift out of my pouch, my belly flattening again. "I can be a backpack," she said, rearranging herself to match her words. She added, "And I'm good enough at imitating how cloth flows to hide a lot of my mass under a dress. And if you're using your wheelchair, I can hide my extra mass in a bunch of ways. It'll be even easier if you ever become comfortable enough with me to let me keep some of my mass in your gastrointestinal tract, but I should be able to manage without that."

I continued my argument, "There are times when I have to keep both AIs turned off, to keep them safe. If you still haven't worked out how to do vocal cords, you're going to be stuck mute for... indefinite periods of time. Maybe days. Maybe longer."

"When we were jailed, you said that you spent days and weeks without saying a word to anyone. If you can, I can."

"I also said that I have schizoid personality disorder, and I don't think you've got that. If anything, you seem to be developing dependent personality disorder, and I'm not sure I want to encourage that."

"I don't have D.P.D., I'm a bimbo. I don't know what the psychological term is, I just want to support you and what you're trying to do. Nobody else around here is working as hard as you are on X-risks, so if you die, they won't get worked on as well. Doing everything I can to keep you alive is in my own long-term self-interest, even if it does increase short-term risk."

"... How much of that did you crib from things I've said and written?"

"Even if the words are yours, the sentiment is still mine."

I drummed my fingers again. "If we're really going to try doing this long-term... you're still going to have to show up as a service griffon, at least until there's a plausible reason to reduce your number of appearances."

"We can do that when you're safe."

"I'd want you to work on having a voice... and as many other methods of communication as possible. Morse-code squeezes, fine-tuning your colouring changes so you can write on your surface, and so on."

"I'll be happy to."

"And for a few reasons, including both the off chance that there's a super-computer nearby that can infect them across an air-gap, and so you can get a better idea of what would be involved in not being able to speak for a reasonably prolonged period, I'm going to turn off Boomer before we go out. Give my left arm three squeezes and I'll get out of Dodge, and turn Boomer back on as soon as there's no risk to her, so you can speak."

"You've got to come back inside for your injection in three and a half hours anyway. It took me longer than that to figure out how to talk to Alphie. I'll be fine."

I sighed. "In that case - let's lose the flight-suit look, and go for something more appropriate for walking about, shall we?"

--

Brenda was entirely capable of imitating the shape and appearance of a backpack. What her goo-body couldn't manage, though, was to imitate the strength of one. When I tried loading up Brenda-pack with some real tools, from wedges to force doors open or closed to a first aid kit, she struggled to hold it all in... and then just collapsed, the whole set of gear tumbling down my back. A solution was easy enough - I just threw one of the existing backpacks into the fabber for a slight alteration, creating a few openings where it pressed against my back for Brenda to reach through. She assured me that all her 'thinky bits' were safe inside, and if she did get yanked off, the part of her forming my clothes would be just fine for at least an hour, and there was more than enough extra mass in the freezer for her to rebuild herself with.

After checking that nobody else - not even the Observers - felt the need to accompany me, I grabbed my Explorer Special cane (which could telescope out to ten feet, and had screw-tips at both ends for hooks, spikes, and a few other gizmos sharing backpack space with Brenda), and trudged down the drive.

The office's exterior looked like one of those faux log cabins that lounged at the entrance to campgrounds, to give RV owners the feeling that they were being 'rustic'. Hand-stenciled signs lurked under a patio's eaves, offering 'paint', 'chrony', and 'spell scrolls' for reasonable prices. A darkened, red-and-white pop machine offered various concoctions for ten dollars - or one 'silver piece' - per bottle.

When I stepped onto the patio, the pop machine lit up.

I backstepped quickly, looking around for anyone who might have snuck up behind me while I was distracted; but after a few moments of nothing else happening, let myself relax a tad. After a moment of thought, I took a few more steps back to look up at the office's roof, confirming that, as I thought I'd remembered, the solar panels were dusty, but not completely obscured.

I unfolded my cane to its ten-foot length, and poked at the pop machine with it. It didn't do anything, even when I pushed the 'root beer' button. Since I didn't have any dollars or 'silver pieces' that looked like they'd fit in the slot, I shortened my cane to a more supportive length and cautiously passed it.

After that, I was only modestly surprised that, when I opened the front door, the interior lights came on.

Just inside the door, to my left, a rack carried skulls lined up like bowling balls. A sign proclaimed "Win big! Bring back a phylactery for fifty gold pieces!". Beyond them, another rack, this one of goggles, whose sign exclaimed "For the full experience!". To the right was a small counter and stool, perhaps for check-outs; further inside was a rack full of pamphlets for campgrounds and other local attractions, a couple of empty coolers, a stand-up video-game arcade, a door to some restrooms, and another door labelled 'office'. The main room bent in an 'L' around those rooms, and I saw the edges of some further shelves in the back part, and some weirdly-shaped vaguely gun-like things racked on the wall.

All in all, it was extremely... ordinary. A bit faded. Tacky, even.

Before I stepped inside, I gave my mental North a nudge, asking for my paranoid subself's advice, and it occurred to me to wonder about what I /wasn't/ seeing. No broken glass from years of storms; very little dirt or debris tracked about; only a few dust-bunnies. I looked at the glass doors - they might have been washed a year ago, or a decade, if the weather had been good, but the outside was nearly invisible from the inside, and vice versa. I looked around at the parking lot, and considered the lack of tire-tracks in the leaf-litter from previous autumns. I looked over at the castle itself, the giant cat's jaws frozen open in a permanent silent roar.

I decided to try the obvious, and asked thin air, "Is anybody home?"

Silence reigned.

I grabbed my walkie-talkie from my belt, and sent back to Munchkin, "So far, so good. There's power, but no sign anyone's been here in years. I'm heading inside."

I hung it up on my belt, and reached over my shoulder and into my pack. I thought aloud, "Did I pack those wedges on top?" Before I could call up my most recent memory palace, I felt the pack's contents shifting - and a pair of wedges slid into my hand. I cracked a smile to myself, and said "Better than Heward's Handy Haversack."

While I was making sure the front doors wouldn't be able to close on me, the arcade machine bleeped. I froze.

After nothing much happening for a few more moments, I stepped inside to take a closer look at it. Along the top, the marquee didn't list a particular game, just "Video Games!". The screen glowed, showing just a few lines of text, in a highly-pixellated, early nineteen-eighties font. "A new challenger appears! Would you like to play a game? One coin = one play."

I was feeling just a tad creeped out, but shrugged, and said to Brenda, "I never really was one for quarter-sucking arcades. For one, quarters were hard to come by when I was young enough to be entranced by them. For another, I liked the more in-depth games that took longer to finish - Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, Ultima Four... and I may be the only person alive who's ever heard of the 'Codex of Ultimate Wisdom'. Great, now I'm depressed again."

I looked around for something to distract me, and my eyes fell on the checkout desk, which I was now at an angle from which I could see had drawers. In moments, I'd learned they were unlocked, and full of assorted commercial detritus - push-pins, a stapler, dried-out rubber bands, wrapping paper, and a bit of loose change. I held up the two quarters I'd found, trying to cheer myself up with the numismatic novelty of coins minted after I'd died, but that bit of ironic amusement only lasted a moment.

I looked at the arcade machine, then at the quarters. With a shrug, I went over, set one on the rim of the marquee, and deposited the other into the slot.

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Seven: Mis-sion*

My eyes were drifting closed, no matter how hard I fought to keep them open.

Once they completely shut, and I heard the digital bloops meaning I'd lost a virtual life, I realized that it wasn't because I was tired, it was because Brenda had extended a few fingers of her substance through my fur to push them closed. /Then/ I realized she was squeezing my left arm, three times and a pause, another three times and another pause.

Aloud, I murmured, "I'll just take a sec and get to a save point, and reached for the joystick.

Brenda didn't let go of my eyelids.

I sighed, and dropped my hands. "Or maybe I'll just head out."

I felt her start to withdraw.

I checked Scorpia, noting, with mild surprise, that I'd been playing for over three hours. I grabbed my walkie-talkie - I remembered getting check-in calls and just responding with "I'm fine," and the like - and announced, "I'm coming back in."

Ignoring the sounds of three hours of mission goals and accomplishments being tossed into the bit bucket, I left the office.

In Munchkin, while Bunny Joe fiddled in the kitchenette and the two Observers watched through their gas-masks, Sarah raised a furry eyebrow at me. "What did you find?"

I rubbed the back of my neck. "Funny story. I found an old video game, and was feeling nostalgic, and, well, lost track of time."

Sarah crossed her arms, and her tail thrashed. "If your mind is still that distractible, you need to talk with Amy or Abigail."

I nodded, contritely. "That makes sense. Lemme go change, hit the autodoc for my meds, and then I'll see if the heliograph can reach them."

As soon as the door to my private car closed, I felt Brenda sliding out of the backpack; she even unbuckled the straps and set it down on the floor for me. Before I'd made it two steps further, she'd shifted her entire appearance, going from 'practical outdoors explorer outfit' to 'long, flowing, ice-blue dress'.

"If the harem ever finds out you can do that," I said to her, only half-joking, "I don't think they'd ever let you do anything else." She squeezed my arms, and I added, "Right - voice. Lemme turn on Boomer..."

"Well," said Brenda through the AI, "that was kind of boring, really."

"I know, I know," I admitted. "I should have been spending my time on more important things, not a silly game." I brushed my fingers over the handheld Simon game on my workbench. "I haven't even got the excuse that it was a psychologically healthy release of tension, or the like."

"So you're not perfect," my dress told me. (Yet another of those experiences I'd never expected to have...) "If it only cost you a few hours to figure that out, you're ahead of the curve, and you can spend tomorrow doing real work instead of playing that game, right?" I didn't answer right away. "Right?" she repeated.

"I was just starting to figure out some of the patterns," I said. "If I can't find out if they're right or not - it'll be kind of frustrating."

"So?"

I shrugged. "They say pattern recognition is an important cognitive skill. And gamification can be a good way to increase motivation to learn skills - even something as simple and old-fashioned as crossword puzzles can help teach trivia."

"You have a castle in the shape of a giant lion out there, waiting to be explored, and you're seriously telling me you'd rather play astro globs?"

"That's 'astro blobs', and that was just one of the minigames."

"Bunny."

I sighed. "This is part of why I turned off Boomer for the trip. A lot of what I do, you're going to think is boring. If you're not happy hanging around with me playing games for a few hours, you're going to be less happy when I spend the whole day doing nothing but reading complicated technical papers."

"That's an interesting point that's worth talking about, but you're avoiding the question."

"Which question?"

"You've got the Free Company people watching your every move, you've got this whole place which your AIs don't know about, you've said that a new Singularity could happen any day... and you want to play a stupid /game/?"

I rubbed the back of my neck. "Well, when you put it like /that/..."

"Good. That's settled. Now - do you want me to shrink down off the shoulders, or leave some straps? How about adding some mass to increase your, I'll be frank, non-existent cleavage? I can't go higher than knee length for the hemline, unless you let me hide some mass inside you, but how about slits on the sides to show off your thighs?"

"... Yep, the harem would just love you. Default answer: 'as conservative as possible'."

"Spoilsport."

--

After my current morning routine (which, now that Wagger was mostly leaving my legs to me, once again included basic 'how to fall' training from a trainer-bun), and after cautiously agreeing to let Brenda demonstrate that she could comb every strand of my pelt into place and clean every square millimeter of my skin in just a few seconds, it was time to work out the day's plan, so I gathered everyone outside Munchkin next to a campfire, to drink hot beverages and gab.

"First up," I said, "I'm going to try looking through the tourism office's, er, office, for any useful paperwork, like maps or control instructions."

One of the Observers - who I'd yet to see eat or drink - asked, "You are not planning on resuming playing the game?"

I shrugged, feeling embarrassed again. "Not only am I not planning on it, I'm using some of the tricks from my therapy to actively avoid it. For example, a lot of my motivation to play the thing seems to be tied up with my nostalgia for pre-Singularity entertainment, so I'm making plans to fulfill that desire with things that don't require such full focus on one thing, like merging today's task with my pleasant memories of an old game about exploring ruins. It's not perfect, but I think it'll get the job done. And even if I do succumb to the desire to play with the arcade cabinet, I think I can still pull off a nudge to play with it by disassembling it to look for shiny pieces inside."

The Observers turned their masks to each other, and then the other one said, "We look forward to seeing if your therapy is successful."

"Er - thanks. That said, I want to spend a few minutes brainstorming about portcullises with you. I could just use an extension ladder to get over the outer wall, but I want to be able to lift the things if I can't get to what's supposed to raise them. Maybe a medieval windlass - that's pretty much just a giant spool for heavy chains, with a long handle to turn it - maybe an electric motor, but the whole point of a castle is to block access to such things by interloping outsiders like us. And also remember, if feasible, I'd like to keep the place in good shape to protect us once we're on the inside, so 'blow it up', while simple and effective, shouldn't be Plan A..."

Bunny Joe started off with, "I want to remember that what can keep people out can keep people in. Part of this castle's mystery is that it used to be a prison. We do not want to break open all the entrances until we are sure there is nothing on the inside waiting to be let out."

--

"Say, Brenda, I've been meaning to ask; can you see out of any part of you?"

"Not exactly, but close enough."

"... Right. Well, if I print up a card with Morse code on it, and put it in one of your pockets, could you read it?"

"Pockets are dark."

"Hm... how sensitive is your sense of touch? How about I fab up a card with letters, dots, and dashes embossed on it, for you to refer to?"

"That could work."

--

As I fumbled with the office desk's locks, I muttered aloud, "This is what I get for having read up on /how/ to pick locks without ever having /practiced/ picking locks..."

From the shop's main room, I heard Joe ask, "Have you tried any of these glasses yet?"

I called back, "I already have one pair, and I doubt any of them have my prescription."

"These glasses don't show you what there is to see - they show what is not there to see at all."

"Hunh," I tried tapping the third tumbler into place, "So someone cracked the problem of decent augmented reality? I can see how that could turn a tourist trap into a decent playing site. As long as you can throw up some floors and walls, you can move most of your decorating costs to software. Not sure I'll want to live in an undecorated castle, though."

"If the decorations are in these glasses, why not put some on?"

"I risked my brain on the video game - I'll let you be the one to risk yours on those things. So, what do you see?"

"Angry spirits hovering over the skulls. Those cupboards are full. There is a sign hovering over your head that says 'Name: Unknown. Swipe for more details.'"

"So swipe."

"I do not know..." She waved her hands in front of her face. "Oh, there it goes. Now a really big sign is in the way of everything, with lots of words and numbers. Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom-"

"Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma?" I guessed.

"Indeed."

"Anything about Comeliness?"

"Not that I can see. Class, Unknown, Alignment, Unknown-"

"How about Race?"

"Again, not that I can see."

"Hm... that sounds like it's based on either Basic D and D, or maybe even the original version, rather than A D and D or the later editions."

"Are you gaining amusement from spouting words that I do not understand?"

"A little, yeah. What sort of numbers are there?"

"Strength, eight, intelligence, eighteen, wisdom, twelve, dexterity, eight, constitution, six, charisma, three..."

"I'm not sure if I should be flattered or insulted. I never seriously thought my Int was higher than fifteen, and even that was pushing it... and a three for charisma? Really? Where's it getting these numbers from, anyway?"

"It does not say."

"And here I thought at least half the fun of LARPing was in pretending to be someone /else/, not just being yourself. ... Crap, I just lost the tumblers again. Okay, time to break out the crowbar. Guess that means I don't qualify as a thief. ... Okay, fold-out maps, rolled-up posters, pamphlets, patches - it's all just advertising stuff."

"Your sign just changed. It now reads 'Alignment: Chaotic'."

"... Hunh. Hm... Well, if we do come across records of who actually owns the place, I'll be happy enough to offer reparations for the damage I'm doing."

"It just changed to 'Alignment: Lawful'."

"And now I'm creeped out that something's watching us - and judging. You might not believe how many hours of discussion have gone into what the whole law-versus-chaos thing really means, especially when the good-versus-evil axis hasn't been split out of it."

"Oh, look, even the skull spirits are looking bored from your pointless monologue."

"Need I point out that my pointless monologue is the result of the therapy that you were part of the intervention to get me to take? I /could/ fill my nostalgia sub-self's needs by going back to that video game and wasting a few-"

I was interrupted by my walkie-talkie, which emitted Sarah's voice. "Bunny, a high-priority message is coming in on the heliograph. I think it's from the squiddies - it's in code, all I can read is 'urgent' and 'time-sensitive'."

"I'll be right in," I sent back, and started heading out. I glanced at Joe. "We might need to cut this short. Coming?"

She was still poking at nothing in particular in mid-air. "Leave the radio."

I raised an eyebrow, but was in a hurry, so just shoved it into her hand as I passed by.

In Munchkin, I grabbed the coded message that had been received so far from a bun-bot's hands, and kept walking back to my room. "Sorry, Brenda," I said, "you're going to have to head out front while I translate this."

"I can keep myself from looking."

"Part of gaining a security clearance is accepting that there are things you're not cleared for. Shoo, go be a griffon for a while - it'll do you some good to be more than a bodysuit."

She started sliding down my body, pooling at my feet before taking her more usual form. "I suppose I can go catch some squirrels or something to eat and practice on."

"Like I told Joe, we may have to leave, so don't go too far."

Once she was out of the room, and I locked the door, I set down the paper and started working through the code. It was a fairly simple one, in case I didn't have either of the AIs handy to decrypt it, so it only took a few minutes for me to read, "Metropolis being attacked by two flying machines. Descriptions match Warthog drones from pre-Singularity American military. Significant damage and casualties. Origin unobserved, speculated to be Technoville. All above-water assets considered at risk. Recommend your withdrawal from urban areas to underwater habitat prepared in anticipation of-"

That was as far as it got; the rest was still flashing over the landscape.

"Okay," I thought to myself, "worst case scenario, roughly, is Technoville has me up next on its target list, and has a good enough intelligence network to know roughly where we are. As far as I know, the only urban areas within a few dozen klicks have been converted into cooling towers, so there's nowhere to hide Munchkin... unless it fits into the castle. From what I saw on the maps, it /might/ be able to squeeze into the stables..."

I grabbed a walkie-talkie and gave Joe a quick order, "Joe? Time's a factor - grab the maps of the castle from the office and bring them here, quick."

I jotted down some quick figures. Each of the five cars was a standard cargo container, eight feet wide, twenty long, and eight and a half high; on top of a sled which matched the length and width, but raised the base of the containers twenty-two inches from the ground. I remembered the top of the castle was sixty-six feet above the mound, and I'd seen five stories in the maps, so... /maybe/.

I left my private room to meet up with Joe, who was still wearing her new glasses, and spread the maps. "Okay - side-view. Those arrow-slits are listed as being ten feet above each other, so that's probably how tall each story is... how thick are the floors? Doesn't say. Okay, floorplans. First floor. Between the forelegs, into the chest... at that scale, those inner doors are, I can't tell, just under ten feet apart? How accurate is this map, anyway? Okay, straight down the middle, from the outer doors to the hall out of the stables, that's... sixty feet. And if those aren't load-bearing pillars, and are just separators for the stables, then where the lion's lungs would be, each of those two stables are... about ten feet wide, and just over twenty feet long. So, maybe, if the ceiling's not too short, if that hall's not too narrow, we /might/ be able to fit two of Munchkin's cars in the stables, and the other three in the middle."

Joe and Sarah glanced at each other, then at me. Sarah was the one who asked, "Why would we want to?"

"Metropolis is being bombed. There's a chance we're next, and as fast as Munchkin is on the straightaway, we can't outrun real aircraft. There's nowhere anywhere near here to hide, except, maybe, inside the castle that the Free Company thought had enough special about it to be a worthy test of something-or-other about us. Since I wasted so much time yesterday, we're going to do as fast a survey as we can, and if Munchkin /can/ fit, get those portcullises up and put her inside and pretend nobody's around here. ... When we do, I should give the heliograph relayers instructions to hide out themselves for a while, so they're not obvious targets, either."

Sarah offered, "What if Munchkin does not fit?"

"Not sure yet. We could try parking it right against the inside of the outer wall, and hope we're not seen... maybe I could fab up some camouflage netting to throw on top. We could start travelling full-tilt, either away from Technoville and hope we can make it out of the planes' operational range; or back towards Erie, grab everyone we know, take shelter underwater with the squiddies."

Joe frowned. "You do not intend to fight back?"

"Against aircraft whose owners are confident enough in them to attack Cleveland? I've barely managed to create crossbows and airguns, and I've got one hand-held finicky laser that needs to be tuned for every shot. I can't even make decent fireworks, let alone something that could take out an airplane before it dropped all sorts of unpleasantness on our heads."

Sarah glanced at the Observers, then the Acadians, then back at me. "So you're just going to run and hide?"

I shook my head. "No, /first/ I'm going to see if we can hide Munchkin, and if we can, do that. /Then/, if that works out, we'll have enough breathing room to work out what to do next. Best case, it's only Cleveland that's being attacked, and this is all just a drill. In fact, that's the most likely case. But the /consequences/ of the case if we /are/ a target are big enough that I'd like to get a few thousand tons of rock between me and any airplanes in the area, as fast as possible. Sarah, grab a ladder and go to the main gate, find out what it takes to open it. Senior Acadian, please go outside and call in my service griffon. Joe, you're going to use another ladder to hop the outer wall, and get to that entrance in the lion's chest, and see if the AIs can get a good enough view to see if this whole exercise is futile. I'm going to see if I can finish up those jacks I started fabbing overnight, or if we need to find some keys or controls for the whole place..."

--

As soon as I turned Boomer on, I discovered that all of that initial plotting was moot; her three-dimensional renderings proved that Munchkin was too tall to make it through the outer gatehouse. I called everyone back in for a confab.

"Plan A is a bust," I sighed. "So - for the moment, /starting/ with the assumption that Technoville planes are on their way /right now/, what are our best options for Plan B?"

Sarah asked, "Can Munchkin go over the wall?"

I grimaced. "Almost. The specs say she can manage obstacles of up to twelve feet, the wall's ten above ground level - but there's that ditch around the wall, five feet deep. And the two spots where there's no ditch, there's a tower in the way."

"How wide is the ditch?"

Boomer answered, "For the majority of its length, roughly eight feet, narrower where the towers bulge out of the wall."

"And how long are Munchkin's leg-feet things?"

Boomer supplied, "Just under ten feet."

Sarah suggested, "So, can't we just have Munchkin go straight up, and have the back cars help support the front one as it does whatever it does to move its front end over the ditch and up the wall?"

"Maybe," I said, arms crossed, "but the cars aren't designed to support each other's weight like that; each one is pretty well independent of the others, just hooked up to share power, water, and with those accordion airlocks. There's pretty much no room for anything to go wrong, like the edge of the ditch collapsing... and all of the car's weight would be on the edge of the ditch. I'm fairly sure that if we tried that, whatever car went first would roll into the ditch."

Joe said, "Then maybe we should sacrifice one car on purpose, send it into the ditch to be a step for the others to climb over."

"... Hunh," I said. "That... just might work. These cars are based on cargo containers that are supposed to stack on each other, so they should be able to support the weight."

Sarah asked, "How would we get the car out of the ditch?"

I answered, "It's only five feet deep - and like I said, the Munchkin cars are supposed to be able to climb a dozen feet. We could get it out of the ditch, just not into the castle's courtyard."

Sarah suggested, "Leave it in place? Cover it with some tarps?"

I grimaced. "If we could do that for one car, we could do it for them all. If we're dealing with pre-Singularity military hardware, I'm expecting it to have infrared, maybe radar, as well as visible light. A few feet of stone could be enough to hide Munchkin's cars, which is why I'm suggesting the castle. We'd have to find somewhere else for the one car... maybe push it up against the office, maybe send it down the road or railway as a distraction? Anyway, it sounds like we have a Plan A-one - Joe, you're back on chest-gate survey duty, while the rest of us work on Plan B."

--

"I hope you have a good plan B," Joe sent over the walkie-talkie, "because Munchkin isn't going to fit."

"Crap. Walls too narrow?"

"No, Alphie says there's just enough room. It's the ceilings - the horse pegs them at just about nine feet, not ten."

"Hrm. Okay, come on back in."

"Well, Sarah - Plan A one is bust. Plan A two is based on the fact that Munchkin's cars were built based on a modular design - the cargo containers are mostly separate from the 'sleds'. Shouldn't take much work to separate them... and the containers are a standard eight and a half feet tall. So with some finagling, it just may be possible to get the sleds to push and pull the cars into the castle, instead of just walking in. Mind you, given that, then we might be able to leave the cargo container parked as, well, just an ordinary cargo container, and get the last sled over the wall and in with the rest of Munchkin."

"That seems a little excessive. Is it really worth the time and effort?"

"Boomer, why don't you read aloud those weapon stats you showed me?"

Boomer complied. "The standard armament of the unmanned warthog is a seven-barrel Gatling gun, firing four thousand rounds per minute of depleted uranium and high explosive in a five-to-one mix, each round weighing roughly fourteen ounces, at three thousand five hundred feet per second."

Sarah's ears flattened. "And what does that mean?"

I suppressed a snort. "A single round could punch through all of Munchkin's carriages in a row and barely slow down. That gun can fire sixty rounds per /second/. If any of those drones take a disliking to us, we're all dead. Period. There won't be enough left of our bodies to make a jar of chunky salsa, let alone be cryopreserved. Hey, Joe, that was fast."

Joe considered, "How much would the castle walls protect against that?"

Boomer answered, "Each round can penetrate roughly three to four feet of mortared stone. Given the rounded shape of the structure, some portions of the walls are that thick. Most are not."

I expanded, "I'm not expecting it to protect us - well, maybe if we hid out in the basement. I'm trying to come up with a way for us to not get shot at in the first place. Plan B is just run, but there's no way to know how far we'd have to go, plus we'd lose the helio link. Plan C is find somewhere else to hide, but there's nothing on the maps anywhere near here. Plan D is head back to Erie, which is an even bigger target than this place."

Sarah asked, "Have Jeff and the others been warned?"

"... Good question. Best not to assume. I'll send some 'grams. Anyway - Plan E, go underwater, which means the squiddies. Plan F, the university, risking whatever's going on in Indian Country. Plan G, just plain Indian Country. The H plans are trying to talk to whoever's controlling the drones, via one means or another. Plan I is to ask Technoville for help - we don't /know/ they're running the drones. Plan J is to hire the Free Company. The plans after that get rather less plausible. Which one was building a catapult to launch Brenda at one, to infiltrate their airbase?"

Sarah ran her finger down the list. "W."

"Right. Given all of those, then until such time as we can get more intelligence on what's going on, I'm judging that our best option is to deny these things as much intelligence about us as possible - to wit, our obvious visual, radar, and infrared profiles. Even if that does mean half-disassembling our vehicle and taking refuge in a haunted castle. ... And Joe, take those glasses off - they look silly, and they're a security threat."