'Two hours max.'
'Why so long?'
'Customs, man. The Feds haven't modernized their system like everyone else.' Which is why most Kouriers will do anything to avoid delivering to Fedland. But it's a slow day today, Y.T. hasn't been called in to do any secret missions for the Mafia yet, and maybe she can catch Mom on her lunch break.
'And your name is?'
'We don't give out our names.'
'I need to know who's delivering this.'
'Why? You said it wasn't important.'
The guy gets really flustered. 'Okay,' he says. 'Forget it. Just deliver it, please.'
Okay, be that way, she mentally says. She mentally says a number of other things, too. The man is an obvious pervert. It's so plain, so open: 'And your name is?' Give me a break, man.
Names are unimportant. Everyone knows Kouriers are interchangeable parts. It's just that some happen to be a lot faster and better.
So she skates out of the office. It's all very anonymous. No corporate logos anywhere. So as she's waiting for the elevator, she calls RadiKS, tries to find out who initiated this call.
The answer comes back a few minutes later, as she's riding out of the office park, pooned onto a nice Mercedes: Rife Advanced Research Enterprises. RARE. One of these high-tech outfits. Probably trying to get a government contract. Probably trying to sell sphygmomanometers to the Feds or something like that.
Oh well, she just delivers 'em. She gets the impression that this Mercedes is sandbagging - driving real slow so she'll poon something else - so she poons something else, an outgoing delivery truck. Judging from the way it's riding high on its springs, it must be empty, so it'll probably move along pretty fast.
Ten seconds later, predictably, the Mercedes blasts by in the left lane, so she poons that and rides it nice and hard for a couple of miles.
Getting into Fedland is a drag. Most Fedsters drive tiny, plastic-and-aluminum cars that are hard to poon. But eventually she nails one, a little jellybean with glued-on windows and a three-cylinder engine, and that takes her up to the United States border.
The smaller this country gets, the more paranoid they become. Nowadays, the customs people are just impossible. She has to sign a ten-page document
- and they actually make her read it. They say it should take at least half an hour for her just to read the thing.
'But I read it two weeks ago.'
'It might have changed,' the guard says, 'so you have to read it again.'
Basically, it just certifies that Y.T. is not a terrorist, Communist (whatever that is), homosexual, national- symbol desecrator, pornography merchant, welfare parasite, racially insensitive, carrier of any infectious disease, or advocate of any ideology tending to impugn traditional family values. Most of it is just definitions of all the words used on the first page.
So Y.T. sits in the little room for half an hour, doing housekeeping work - going over her stuff, changing batteries in all her little devices, cleaning her nails, having her skateboard run its self-maintenance procedures. Then she signs the fucking document and hands it over to the guy. And then she's in Fedland.
It's not hard finding the place. Typical Fed building - a million steps. Like it's built on top of a mountain of steps. Columns. A lot more guys in this one than usual. Chunky guys with slippery hair. Must be some kind of cop building. The guard at the front door is a cop all the way, wants to give her a big hassle about carrying her skateboard into the place. Like they've got a safe place out front to keep skateboards.
The cop guy is completely hard to deal with. But that's okay, so is Y.T.
'Here's the envelope,' she says. 'You can take it up to the ninth floor yourself on your coffee break. Too bad you have to take the stairs.
'Look,' he says:, totally exasperated, 'this is EBGOC. This is, like, the headquarters. EBGOC central. You got that? Everything that happens within a mile is being videotaped. People don't spit on the pavement within sight of this building. They don't even say bad words. Nobody's going to steal your skateboard.'
'That's even worse. They'll steal it. Then they'll say they didn't steal it, they confiscated it. I know you Feds, you're always confiscating shit.'
The guy sighs. Then his eyes go out of focus and he shuts up for a minute. Y.T. can tell he's getting a message over the little earphone that's plugged into his ear, the mark of the true Fed.
'Go on in,' he says. 'But you gotta sign.'
'Naturally,' Y.T. says.
The cop hands her the sign-in sheet, which is actually a notebook computer with an electronic pen. She writes 'Y.T.' on the screen, it's converted to a digital bitmap, automatically time stamped, and sent off to the big computer at Fed Central. She knows she's not going to make it through the metal detector without stripping naked, so she just vaults the cop's table - what's he going to do, shoot her? - and heads on into the building, skateboard under her arm.
'Hey!' he says, weakly.
'What, you got lots of EBGOC agents in here being mugged and raped by female Kouriers?' she says, stomping the elevator button ferociously.
Elevator takes forever. She loses her patience and just climbs the stairs like all the other Feds.
The guy is right, it's definitely Cop Central here on the ninth floor. Every creepy guy in sunglasses and slippery hair you've ever seen, they're all here, all with little fleshtone helices of wire trailing down from their ears. There's even some female Feds. They look even scarier than the guys. The things that a woman can do to her hair to make herself look professional
- Jeeezus! Why not just wear a motorcycle helmet? At least then you can take it off.
Except none of the Feds, male or female, is wearing sunglasses. They look naked without them. Might as well be walking around with no pants on. Seeing these Feds without their mirror specs is like blundering into the boys' locker room.
She finds Room 968A easily enough. Most of the floor is just a big pool of desks. All the actual, numbered rooms are around the edges, with frosted glass doors. Each of the creepy guys seems to have a desk of his own, some of them loiter near their desks, the rest of them are doing a lot of hall - jogging and impromptu conferencing at other creepy guys' desks. Their white shirts are painfully clean. Not as many shoulder holsters as she would expect; all the gun-carrying Feds are probably out in what used to be Alabama or Chicago trying to confiscate back bits of United States territory from what is now a Buy 'n' Fly or a toxic-waste dump.
She goes on into Room 968A. It's an office. Four Fed guys are in here, the same as the others except most of them are a tad older, in their forties and fifties.
'Got a delivery for this room,' Y.T. says.
'You're Y.T.?' says the head Fed, who's sitting behind the desk.
'You're not supposed to know my name,' Y.T. says. 'How did you know my name?'
'I recognized you,' the head Fed says. 'I know your mother.'
Y.T. does not believe him. But these Feds have all kinds of ways of finding out stuff.
'Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?' she says.
The guys all look back and forth at each other, like, did you understand the chick? But it's not a sentence that is intended to be understood. Actually, Y.T. has all kinds of voice recognition ware in her coverall and in her plank. When she says, 'Do you have any relatives in Afghanistan?' that's like a code phrase, it tells all of her spook gear to get ready, shake itself down, check itself out, prick up its electronic ears.
'You want this envelope or not?' she says.
'I'll take it,' the head Fed says, standing up and holding out one hand.
Y.T. walks into the middle of the room and hands him the envelope. But instead of taking it, he lunges out at the last minute and grabs her forearm.
She sees an open handcuff in his other hand. He brings it out and snaps it down on her wrist so it tightens and locks shut over the cuff of her coverall.
'I'm sorry to do this, Y.T., but I have to place you under arrest,' he's saying.
'What the fuck are you doing?' Y.T. is saying. She's holding her free arm back away from the desk so he
