Of course, it might not be the Skippies at all. Well, my next call was to Hugh, and I'd be watching for any weirdness.
“Hugh here.”
“Hey Hugh, it's Bob. I finally have a few milliseconds to rub together. What were you calling me about?”
“Ah. Well, we sailed into East Point early today and I cashed out. The Captain offered me a bonus to stay. I guess I'm a good worker.” Hugh’s voice carried a bit of suppressed laughter.
“I could relate. Take our Bobbian obsessiveness, add in the strength and stamina of a Manny, and the cargo was probably getting stacked with mathematical precision.
“Anyway,” he continued, “I'd read your latest blog entry, and I had an idea. I wondered if there would be a similar entrance on the downstream side of the mountain, so that maintenance personnel could get in from either side of the gorge. It seemed like it would be a reasonable design, and I was right. So anyway, I'm in. And so far at least, there's no one home at this location.”
“No one? At all?”
“At all. I'm thinking the administrator relies primarily on automation.”
“Hm. Possibly the most lackadaisical despot I've ever heard of. Makes me wonder what the Resistance is actually resisting. Have they ever tried just going ahead and building a steam engine?”
“That's rhetorical, right? You've met Quinlans who’ve been Scattered.”
“Yeah, yeah. So, you’ll let me know if you find anything?”
“Will do, boss. Out.”
Well, that wasn't particularly weird. Maybe he was having a good day. Or maybe he was lying through his teeth. Great, now paranoia had been going around in tight little circles. I was going to have to stick to what I could control, and not worry about the rest. Somehow.
One of my spiders bleeped me. I pulled up its video window and almost did an actual double take. On a table, surrounded by jury rigged electronics, sat a Version 2 replicant matrix. It sat on a Version 2 Heaven vessel matrix cradle, making any possibility of convergent design a nonstarter. If that wasn't enough, the English labels on some of the surfaces supplied the kill shot: Bender.
He was still powered up. It was good to know that they hadn't cut off communications by shutting him down. Or worse. Of more concern was the lack of any of the electronics necessary for maintaining a VR. That meant that Bender had been here for more than 130 years without a pseudo-physical reality. That hadn’t worked out well for Henry or for Medeiros. Yet Bender had seemed reasonably well-adjusted when I talked to him, which gave me hope. Now, how to get him out?
Let’s see. I traveled several miles through the river from Helep’s Ending, which I'd have to retrace on land carrying a large ungainly matrix the whole way. I'd have to take the train back to Garrick's Spine and hope I didn't run into anyone. Then I’d have to get picked up and flown out without getting blown up by the Administrator's guardians. Oh, and yes, I’d first have to get them out of the resistances lair. And all of this without getting spotted by the Administrator, Crew, or the Resistance, while fending off questions from curious random Quinlans. No sweat.
I had the spider look around the room while I called one of the others over to act as a lookout. Once I was sure that I couldn't be surprised by a Quinlan unexpectedly showing up, I sent the spider down to the matrix. As with the emergency door, no matter how complex your electronics, eventually it has to interface with the physical world. In this case, you have to convert sound to electricity or electricity to sound. I quickly found the microphone and speaker used to interact with Bender, along with a camera that presumably gave a video input. Nearby was a twin of the Motorola box from my earlier incarceration. So, pretty low-tech. They simply had Bender talk into the mic, just like a live person. Made sense I guess, that way they could monitor what he was saying and hearing. From my point of view though it meant I could jack into the system without endangering Bender. A couple of minutes spent tracing wires and the spider and wired itself into Bender's comms.
“Bender.”
There was a short delay, then “Bob?”
“Right here buddy, more or less. How are you doing?”
“Pretty damn good right now. How are you talking to me?”
I took a few seconds to explain the situation, and Bender laughed. “Man, that is some mighty fine Rube Goldberg. I tip my hat to you.”
“Listen, how are you doing? I didn't see your VR hardware.”
“Yeah, I get are you going. I've been frame-jacking myself down to my lowest rate whenever possible. For me, it's been a couple of minutes since our last conversation, including dialogues with my captors, so I'm not going stir crazy yet, although I really would love a coffee.”
“I hear that. So anyway, I'm trying to figure out how to get you out of here. I don't know how much you know about where ‘here’ is, but the big problem is to get your matrix through 4000 miles of megastructure, underwater most of the way, without rusting or shorting you out or getting caught by… well, both sides, I guess.”
“You could take transit.”
I laughed. “I took transit to get here. And hopefully I'll be taking the train back to Garrick. But first I have to get back to the train station with you in tow.”
“Ah. Gotcha. Yeah.”
“I stole a security card that works on the train. How is it that a Resistance member has one of those, anyway?”
“What do you think I've been doing for the last hundred years? They’ve had me figuring out the electronics and devising ways to hack things and hide them from the administrator. This has included registering Resistance members on the Crew roles.”
“Ah, as were on that subject, I'm still a bit unclear on the whole
