Ledman Pickup

Twenty Two

Ginger MacAvoy had a nice view from her corner window office on the fourth floor of the historical San Francisco edifice that housed the headquarters of World Weary Avengers, Incorporated. She shared that level with most of the company's executives and software developers. The CTO had a room in the building's basement and most of the testers were housed down there as well. It wasn't the best arrangement, morale-wise, but as Chief Security Officer, that was none of her concern. Her business was secrecy, privacy, and intellectual property. Ginger's be-freckled golden skin, which matched the golden hair that she kept tied up tight in a bun, along with her aviator sunglasses and bright pink lip gloss, masked the harsh interior life of the tireless watchdog. World Weary Avengers could not afford any lapses; they were the owners of some extremely advanced and therefore dangerous technology. Spies were always sniffing around, spying and prying and trying to break in. It was useful to be paranoid in her position, and to trust no one.

One person she especially didn't trust was Kandhi Clarke. She didn't trust her and she didn't like her and she didn't approve of her existence, for that matter, and Kandhi knew it. Ginger was always trying to push her aside and keep her in the dark. Their loathing of each other was not merely mutual, it was severe and genuine. If Ginger had her way, there would be no quality assurance at all. She wasn't interested in whether their technology worked or not, only that it was never discovered by anyone from the outside world. The developers, all five of them, were under contracts so stringent they could probably not afford to ever leave. Ginger watched their every move. There was nothing she didn't know about them, and nothing she admired much either.

The problem with mind control, she had immediately realized, is the problem of 'who controls the controller?' It was one of those dilemmas of recursions, like 'who created God'? If a device was capable of mind control, it had to be programmed, so the programmer could control it. It had to be operated, so the operator could control it. Any one with a second device could control a person with the first, and so on, and on to infinity. She was not concerned with the ethics. It was rather an impressive achievement, to be able to place specific thoughts into someone else's mind in their own voice, such that it was indistinguishable from their own self-generated ideas. To be able to enter those words into a device and transmit those thoughts into a specific target. That was version one. Version two had introduced the partial binding, whereby the device and the host's mind could inter-operate without the bother of typing or talking or displaying images on a screen. Version three had introduced trans-volitional search, whereby the device would immediately seek and discover throughout the connected universe whatever topics had entered the host's little mind.

The partial bind had led to a state of dependence which Ginger thought was simply deplorable. She had experienced the bind and had rejected it after a time. Now she relied only on her own direct contact with the central hub, the main server within the company that could perform the same activities but with a layer of personal filtering in between - unobtrusive, in other words. She sat now at her desk and conveyed her desires to the mainframe. She was tracking Kandhi's UPD. She had opened a special secret channel into it and could now monitor and control its activity directly. She was disgusted to see that Kandhi, now driving through western Nebraska, was merely searching the public photo and video streams for facial recognition matches of Leonora Wells. Why not use the NatSurv? Ever since the war began, the national surveillance program had become quite extensive. Although it was supposed to be highly confidential and felonious to breach, the people at W.W.A. were light years ahead with un-detectable methods and didn't even concern themselves with being discovered. Even if they were, they had certain contracts that could not be ignored and would have given them a free ride anyway.

The NatSurv quickly provided Ginger with information that Kandhi could have used the night before - Leonora entering Sarah Watson's car and driving it out of the Trinidad rest area. That same car was tracked at several locations along the highways, all the way into Grand Island, Nebraska. It was last spotted at the exit they took, and it was a no-brainer to conclude the car had traveled to the Watson's home not two miles away from there. Scanning that neighborhood's watch cameras for the remainder of the night was fruitless. Certainly they had slept after that long drive. Ginger panned out to within a few miles of the residence, and scanned the rest of the morning's activity. Sure enough, she easily located Leonora Wells sitting with a breakfast sandwich at the Riverside Burger Joint at ten-fifteen in the morning, not a half an hour before.

Ginger instructed Kandhi's You to provide that data to Kandhi, who was surprised and excited to receive it. She was less than twenty miles away and stepped on it. Unfortunately, by the time she arrived, Leonora was gone again. Kandhi was hungry, though, so she ordered a burger and a soda, and sat down at a table outside to enjoy her lunch.

'Worthless', muttered Ginger at the controls in San Francisco. 'Eating that crap. No wonder', she said to herself. The NatSurv had no further information on Leonora just yet. One of its weaknesses was its delay factor. The government, as always, used outdated equipment and the least sophisticated software it could find. While she was certain she would soon acquire imagery of Leonora's next movements, she called Mike Griggs into her office. The scruffy engineer - no older than thirty but as dirty and smelly as any old street bum - worked seventeen hours a day and dreamed about work during the rest.

'Project Personality?' he asked, entering her office. She held up her hand to back him away from the door. She didn't want him stinking up the place, and he knew better, so he stood just outside in the hallway, as she said,

"Fuck that. It's past all that. Now it's just a matter of getting the thing back."

"Did you find the girl?" he asked.

"I only care about the box," she snapped. "The girl's just a carrier. If we can get to it, talk to it. Can we do that?"

"You mean like open a channel?"

"Whatever you want to call it," she told him. "Can we reach it?"

"Not from a distance," Griggsy said. "It's totally masked out. We do tracking, you know. We don't do tracked.'

'I know my own words', Ginger cracked. 'Answer the question. You said 'not from a distance'. Does that mean from closer we can?'

'If we're in range', he said, 'we might get to it on the radio.'

'Radio? Over the air and in the clear?'

'Possibly', Mike considered. Like a walkie-talkie, you know? Scan the frequency but it's such a narrow band and such a low range, you would have to be pretty close.'

'How close? A yard? A mile?'

'A mile might be close enough', he said. 'Go A.M. scanner and look for its signature. It's embedded in the serial number. I'll send you the decode.'

'Fine', she said, and waved him away. A minute or so later she received the data and forwarded it to Kandhi's You, with commands to begin the sweep and report on contact. Privately, she was muttering to herself,

'Move, you lazy slob! Get off your ass and drive around', and then she remembered she had root control of the You. She could invoke its Mind Control Plugin and tell Kandhi to do just that. So she did. Kandhi thought it was her own idea to start driving around the neighborhood. Her You didn't tell her otherwise. It was under filtered forwarding, only giving Kandhi what Ginger permitted it to. To Kandhi, the surveillance seemed utterly useless. She drove around in meandering random patterns throughout the city for more than an hour, and got nothing. She received no sign of Leonora either in person or through her UPD. She was not even informed when her You found the Nupie on the local air band, and transmitted Ginger's message to it. The message was fairly simple. Ginger merely told the renegade device to return to the Riverside Burger Joint, wait there for Kandhi Clarke, and surrender itself to her.