She sighed. “Work space off,” Maj said. Immediately she felt the little hiccup in the back of her head that coincided with her implant passing the “shutdown” order to the doubler in the kitchen, and from there to the Net- access computer in her dad’s workroom. The virtual “Greek villa” behind Maj vanished and left her wholly in late sunlight, sitting at the big somewhat beat-up kitchen table, watching her mother wrestling with the sugar plate. “I don’t know, Maj,” she said after a moment, “this one might be too bumpy to be a wall. Maybe I can curl it up and make a tower out of it.”
“Maybe you should just melt it down and pour it over a waffle,” Maj said, and grinned.
“Don’t tempt me….”
They both glanced up at the hum of a vehicle pulling up in the main parking place out in front of the house. But it was just the school bus bringing Maj’s little sister home from preschool. “I thought her dad was bringing her back today,” Maj’s mother said, straightening up for a moment and massaging her back.
“No, he had something to do at the university….” Maj’s father’s workload had increased somewhat after his tenure came through, so that Maj (and everyone else in the household) was getting used to his schedule not behaving itself, and sometimes messing theirs up as well. But this time of year, with summer coming on fast, fortunately there was little left of Maj’s schedule for her dad’s to interfere with. She had finished her pre-SATs and her finals and was waiting, not entirely calmly, for the results for the former. She had passed all the finals and so had little left to occupy her except the music and riding that she indulged herself in while not building elaborate virtual simulations of aircraft, poking her nose into various interesting parts of the Net, and (very quietly) pursuing the studies which she intended to use to get herself into Net Force.
Which was where her heart really was, these days. Her mother sometimes looked at Maj strangely as she realized that her daughter was no longer the crazed schoolwork fiend she had been in recent years, or rather, she was no longer studying everything that got in her way just because it did. Maj’s studies now had to be more directed, more aimed, because Net Force mattered more than most of the other things in her life, even the hobbies she loved. That fact itself sometimes caused her mom and dad concern…and Maj heartily wished that they wouldn’t waste the effort the concern was causing them. “You ought to keep your options open,” her mother would say, mildly distressed; and “It’s too soon to make up your mind what you’re going to be doing for the rest of your life, or even the next half of it. Wait until after college,” her father would say, trying to look calm, and usually failing. All Maj would do, though, was “Yes-Mom” or “Yes-Dad” them, because she knew what she wanted. She wanted to be in Net Force.
She was working on that already, having started, once she was allowed elective subjects in junior high, to take classes that would play to her strong suits, the things she was already good at. Mostly, Maj was good at figuring things out. Not just short-term circumstances or events, but the way a whole set of events would proceed both if left alone, and if you started tinkering with them. For a couple of years now, since she fully came to the realization that she had the beginnings of this talent, Maj had been privately “predicting” the way events she saw on the news channels in the Net would unfold…and she was much heartened by the fact that the analysis-of-history and group-psych classes she had taken in her freshman and sophomore years had seemed to help the quality of her analyses. The more information you had about the world and the way it had gone before, the better you got at predicting — within limits — the way it would go next. Within limits, of course, which was why Maj kept practicing the art of listening, both to others and to her own hunches. There was no way to predict what would happen if you closed yourself away from useful data by not keeping your eyes and ears open, or by looking in the wrong direction at the right time.
So Maj was concentrating on going in the right direction. She had managed to get into the Net Force Explorers — by itself, not such a shabby achievement, considering how many thousands of kids wanted in and didn’t get there. Maj had some of the smartest “Netizens” of her own age to brainstorm and network with — exploring the Net with them, looking for trouble spots, working out ways to deal with them which could be passed on to Net Force’s senior staff (if you didn’t manage, out of sheer cunning, to do something about a given problem yourself, and cop the credit for a good intervention). And eventually, oh, in two or three years, during or after college, she would apply to join Net Force as an adult operative…and they would hire her. Maj was almost sure of that. There were never enough analysts who were as interested in the world outside the Net as the world inside it, and the crucial interface where they met. That was Maj’s passion — the place where real estate and “unreal estate” met, the juncture between the physical and the virtual. People comfortable on both sides of the divide were what Net Force needed more than anything else if they were to effectively police the “unreal” side — the fastest-growing part of the world these days, and increasingly, as thieves and terrorists and various other kinds of criminals found more and more ways to exploit it, one of the most dangerous.
That last part of the analysis, of course, was one that would have occurred to both her mother and her father before now.
That was the only uncertainty in all this. He was a nice man, the Net Force Explorers liaison, but unpredictable, sometimes unreadable…even for Maj, which she found unusual. Since (having worked with her as a Net Force Explorer) he would most likely be the one to give the go/no-go decision on her hiring, she spent more time than usual wondering what was going on in his head…and wondering how to influence it in her direction, and her favor.
The back screen door was now yanked open, and a short sturdy shape with curly blond hair pushed in through the opening and let the door slam behind her. Maj’s mother sighed. “Adrienne, honey—” she said.
“You’re just going to have to get the compressed-air thing on the door fixed, Mom,” Maj said. “She’s only little. She can’t remember not to slam it all the time.”
“She can’t remember
“C’mere, Muf,” Maj said.
Her little sister shouldered out of her little knapsack, dumped it on the floor, and fixed Maj with an annoyed expression. “I hate school,” Adrienne said. She was wearing the same stubborn expression Maj remembered her as wearing the day she had decided never again to answer to the name “Adrienne,” but only to “Muffin.”
“No, you don’t,” Maj said. “C’mere. You mean you hate something that happened
“Later,” the Muffin said, and Maj had to work not to laugh out loud. That was her father’s preferred line.
“Okay,” Maj said. “Come sit on my lap.”
This was apparently already on the Muffin’s mind. She climbed up into Maj’s lap and looked around her. “Are you virtual now?”
“No, sweetie, it’s turned off.”
The Muffin looked over at their mother. “What’s Mommy doing?”
“Making a castle, Muffin,” their mom said wearily. “Or a mess.”
The Muffin looked interested until she saw the size of the stacked-up cutout cardboard “walls” which were templates for the plates of melted and spun sugar her mother was presently manipulating, or attempting to manipulate. “That castle’s too small for anybody to live in.”
“They could if they were pixies,” Maj said.
Maj’s sister gave her a reproachful look. The Muffin believed enthusiastically in dinosaurs but had no time for pixies, fairies, or any of various other theoretically cute life-forms infesting her storybooks or her virtual “edu- space.”
“A bird could live there,” Muf said after a moment, apparently willing to allow Maj that much slack.
“Probably,” Maj said, resigned. She could remember when she could have gotten away with the pixies remark. There were times when it seemed to her that her little sister was growing up too fast.
“It would starve,” Maj’s mother said absently. She had given up on trying to make a tower out of the piece of wall she had been working with, and had managed to flatten it out properly. Now she finished affixing that piece of wall to the plate-sugar base waiting for it, and having done so she leaned against the counter while she waited for the next piece of sugar plate to heat. “Birds can’t eat sugar, Muf.”
“No. It would rot their teeth,” said the Muffin with the world-weary air of someone who had heard this concept entirely too often.
“Birds don’t have teeth,” Maj said.
