Safe House

“Uh-oh,” Maj said. “Mom?”

Her mother appeared a moment later at the study door. “Problems?”

“He should be in my work space by now. But he’s not getting anything.”

Her mother looked bemused. She came around to stand behind the chair in which Niko sat, and lined up her own implant with the Net computer, then blinked. “It doesn’t recognize his implant,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “The story of my life. Why they can’t just get everyone to agree to standardize these things….”

For a moment more Maj’s mother stood still. “Okay, I see,” she said then. “It’s just a different protocol…. We don’t use that one much over here. Let me just tell the machine what it should do instead….”

A moment’s silence. “Okay, Niko,” her mother said then. “Try that and see how it works.”

He tilted his head a little to one side, then straightened it again. “Oh!” he said.

“It’s a jury-rig,” Maj’s mother said, not sounding entirely happy. “Your implant had a bandwidth limiter written into the code. I just circumvented it. It can be put back the way it was whenever you like. Are the visuals okay now?”

“Yes…!”

“Okay. Maj, check the sales area. It’s getting to be the time of year when they’ll be reducing prices on some of the spring boys’ wear…and this is just for casual wear anyway. Niko doesn’t have to worry about being a fashion plate at the moment. His luggage will be here in a while anyway. If you want to use the machine in my office, go ahead, I won’t need it for an hour or so….”

“Okay, Mom, thanks. Stay there, Niko, I’ll be with you in a minute….”

She went around to her mom’s office and settled into the chair there. A moment later she was in her work space, and Niko was standing there, looking around him in astonishment. “This is…very sophisticated,” he said after a moment.

“A poor thing, but my own,” said Maj. “Computer…”

“Yes, boss?” said her work space.

“GearOnline, please. Boys’ wear.”

“Enter, please.”

“Through here, Niko,” Maj said, and opened the door at the back of her work space, between the bookshelves. Niko went over to it, peered through.

“Bozhe moi,” he said softly.

“I know,” Maj said. They walked through the door together. “I don’t shop here a lot anymore. It’s too easy to get confused….”

The sheer “acreage” of the place always bewildered her a little; the designers had apparently decided to make this space a direct virtual descendant of the old snail-mail catalogs from the distant past, so that every single thing the chain stocked was out here, arranged on a “floor” which Maj guessed was probably roughly equivalent to the area of the surface of the moon.

“Come on over here,” she said, and led him over to what looked like a single changing room, standing there by itself in the middle of the vast floor full of clothes hanging up on racks and stacked up folded on shelves. “I don’t see why we should wander around in all this and get lost. See this grid?” Maj pointed to a lighted square on the floor, all crisscrossed with grid lines. “Just stand here….”

Niko stepped onto it, bemused.

“Store computer, please…” Maj told it.

“Ready to be of service, ma’am. And thank you for shopping GearOnline!”

“Yeah, sure. Please do a measurement template for this gentleman. Niko, hold still, the thing’ll get confused if you twitch.”

The grid of light-lines peeled itself up off the “floor” and wrapped itself around Niko, molding itself to him. He held quite still, but Maj could understand his slightly alarmed look — the template’s feel could be rather snug.

“Don’t freak. It’s getting the readings off the sensors in the chair,” Maj said. “By the way, that was great, in the car…the story you were telling the Muffin, about the cows.”

He gave her a slightly rueful look. “You mean you don’t believe it, then.”

“That you ride cows to work?” She had to laugh. “Have you ever ridden a cow?”

He laughed, too, then. “They are bony.”

“And they dump you off and step on you,” Maj said. “I tried it once when I was little and my folks took me to a farm. Once was enough. Riding horses, though, that’s another matter.”

“You ride—” There was a pause while he got rid of one set of gridwork, tried on another. “Funny.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Why would it be funny?”

“Oh. Your name.”

Maj blinked.

“In my language, Maj might be short for amajzonu. Amazon. A woman who rides.”

She grinned a little. “Well,” Maj said, “the name is really Madeline, but we don’t use it much.”

“A little cake? I think amazon is better.”

The grid of light walked off Niko and stood to one side, a Niko-shaped webwork, glowing green. Niko brushed himself down and stared at it. “Now what do we do?”

“Go crazy trying to figure out what we want,” Maj said. “Chair, please.”

A chair appeared. She sat down. “You want to sit?” Maj said.

“Uh, no, it’s all right,” Niko said. “I was sitting a long time today.”

“Okay. Store program,” Maj said.

“Ready to be of service, ma’am, and—”

“Boy, I wish it wouldn’t do that…. What kinds of things do you want to wear, Niko?”

“Uh — jeans would be fine. Maybe a shirt.”

“Jeans,” Maj said. Instantly a pair of them appeared on the wireframe model of Niko. “How do they look?”

He walked around the model. “And these will fit—”

“Real closely. The company will pull the closest match off the rack in the warehouse and van them over. They have a delivery run out this way a few times a day.”

“Do they have to be blue?” he said.

“You want a different color?”

“Uh…” He smiled, a very small shy smile. “I always wanted black ones.”

“Black, absolutely,” said Maj, and the color of the jeans on the wireframe figure changed. She grinned at him. “Black’s back in this year. Want the shirt that color, too? It’ll look good on you.”

“Yes!”

The heck with the sale stuff. “Formshirt, black,” said Maj. One of the tight-fitting shirts that were coming in right now appeared on the wireframe. “How about that?”

His smile said it all.

“Great,” said Maj. “Store program. Select both, purchase both.”

“Account confirmation.”

“Eighteen twelve,” Maj said.

“Thank you. Pick up or send?”

“Send.”

“Thank you. Your purchases will be dispatched from our Bethesda warehouse at ten A.M.”

“That’s it,” Maj said, and got up. “Can you think of anything else you need?”

“Anything…” Niko looked out across that huge space of clothes, across which Maj sometimes thought one should be able to see the curvature of the Earth. “No,” Niko said, and sounded shy again. “But thank you.”

She patted him on the shoulder. He jumped a little, as if taken by surprise. “It’s okay,” Maj said. “Come on, let’s climb out of here, my mom’s going to want her machine back.”

“It is…a Sunday? And still your mother works?”

Maj rolled her eyes. “It’s more like no one can stop her working. Come on…”

“And thank you for shopping at—” the system shouted after them, rather desperately, as they deactivated their implants.