Runaways

date.'

Megan smiled a small thin smile, for her mother's tone of voice suggested that the boys might have been getting on her nerves today as well. 'Is the Net link in the den free?'

'I don't recall it having been free for the better part of this century,' her mother said, smiling slightly and turning her attention back to her paperwork, 'but if you find any of your brothers in there, go ahead and throw them out. I've heard nothing but sarcasm from them all day… and after your father and I fed them for so long, too. You'd think gratitude was dead.'

'After eating Dad's cooking,' said another voice from down the hall, 'we're the ones who should be dead. He did that thing with the chilies again, last night. Bleaugh!'

Megan and her mother exchanged a sardonic look. 'Is this the new article for TimeOnline?' she said.

'No/' her mother said, with some bemusement, 'that one's finished. Would you believe Bon Appitit asked me to do a feature on copyright issues as they affect the great chefs of the world?'

Megan shook her head. 'Weird.'

'Not if you look at their price per word, it's not,' her mother said, glancing at the fridge. 'I may take up cooking in my old age.'

Megan snorted and headed down the hallway to the bathroom. 'Last warning, you guys,' she said to the immediate neighborhood and anyone who might be listening. 'I'm gonna be in here for a while'

The announcement was greeted with loud applause from down the hall. Megan grinned, locked herself into the bathroom, and spent the better part of half an hour showering herself clean of people sweat, horse sweat, and the emotional detritus of a mostly disagreeable day. When she came out again, dressed in jeans and a plain floppy white T-shirt, Megan felt positively human again, and this feeling was now not impaired by putting her head into the bookcase-lined den and seeing Sean sitting there hogging the big black body-contoured Net chair. He was staring into space and looking glazed, but this merely meant that he was immersed in some other reality, and for the moment Megan had no qualms about throwing him out of it. 'Sean,' she said, 'I need the machine, pronto.'

'Mmm-hmm,' he said.

'Mom says cut it short,' Megan said. 'I have a real- people issue to deal with.'

He blinked. 'Like depriving your brother of his share of the household's recreation time isn't a real-people issue?' Sean said, turning his long self in the chair to look at her. 'Give me another half hour to clean this up.'

'Now,' Megan said. 'Clean it up on your own time, or when Dad lets someone else have a run at the office machine.'

'Be well into the next decade, at this rate,' Sean muttered, getting up out of the chair as slowly as possible and stretching himself. Megan heard joints creak as he did so, but she had no sympathy for him. If he was going to spend that long in the chair without tweaking the muscle- massage program to his requirements, it was his problem.

He then came lumbering across the room at her like some kind of slightly deranged Frankenstein's monster. 'Sean, I don't need it right this minute,' Megan said, but nonetheless Sean came at her with his arms out in front of him and an idiotically aggressive expression on his face that looked very silly on an architecture student. 'Sean-!' Megan said.

'Arrrrrhh,99 Sean said, and Megan resigned herself to the inevitable as he came within reach. She stepped aside and took him by the right wrist, bending it back in a way that wouldn't hurt him unless he struggled. Sean yelped and tried to turn around in the way best designed to break the hold, but Megan glanced down and saw where his feet were-mostly very badly placed for any kind of balance. He tried to shift them, but too late. Megan simply knocked the side of her left riding boot against her brother's right shin. He fell past her, halfway out into the hallway, though at least he managed to roll as he did it.

'I keep telling you,' Megan said with the slightest smile as she stepped over him and went into the den, sitting down in the implant chair, 'leverage is everything. Keep working on it, bozo, you'll get it yet'

'I wasn't set!'

'As if the next mugger who comes along is going to wait for you to be set. You guys don't practice, that's your problem.'

'Other guys have sisters who cut them some slack,'

Sean moaned, already well down the hallway. On his way to the fridge, Megan suspected.

'Other guys have sisters who don't throw them over the horizon often enough,' Megan said under her breath, and smiled. She lined up her implant with the 'eye' on the Net server box, closed her eyes, and did the particular muscular tic that brought the implant up.

She stood at the bottom of the white tiers of amphitheater seats, with a black sky full of hard white stars overhead, and the Sun, a brighter than usual star, now away off on the right, for Rhea had swung right around her primary, as she did once every six hours, and Saturn lay swollen and nearly full near the horizon-the planet's rings edge-on and nearly invisible, a glittering razor of light against the darkness. Megan smiled at the sight, but had no time to play her usual game with herself and try to work out what time it was by Saturn's phase and position in the sky.

She paused by her 'desk,' the white stone slab that hovered in the air at the bottom of her amphitheater, looking to see if any more urgent e-messages or virtmails had arrived since she was here last. Things looked more or less as she had left them, which was a relief, but then it was the weekend, and a lot of her friends were away, or busy with recreational stuff as important to them as her riding business had been for her today.

Though there was one virtmail, its iridescent sphere icon juggling itself up and down in the air, that hadn't been there earlier, and this one caught Megan's attention because the golden iridescence that tagged it was her signal to herself that it was from another Net Force Explorer. She walked over to that mail and poked it with one finger, and in the air off to one side, the message's address and routing information appeared. It was from Leif Anderson, who was the events liaison for a number of the East Coast-based Explorers who occasionally got together to do simming workshops or visit recreational Net venues as an informal group.

'Go,' she said to the virtmail.

A moment later Leif was standing there in the virtual flesh, slight, red-haired and freckled, silhouetted against the background of his workspace, which this week looked like an ice cave. To her bemusement, behind him Megan thought she could see what appeared to be a Cadillac of the middle of the previous century, carved out of the ice. 'Sorry for the group message,' Leif said. 'This is just a follow-up to find out if you saw the virt I sent out last week about the 'expedition' to the new dinosaur exhibition at the Smithsonian. Right now I mostly just need to know if you're going to be able to make it on the first date, the twelfth, since a lot of people seem to have schedule problems. We can reschedule to the nineteenth, but if we do we won't be able to have the paleontologies fellow from NatHist in New York along with us. So mail me, people, so I can figure out what to do about this-'

Megan sighed. I completely forgot about this in the runup to the Potomac Valley event… Til mail him when I get back. She didn't normally treat her contacts with other Explorers so casually. Megan was acutely aware that the networking they were all doing now might stand her in good stead at some later date… like when she finally had enough credentials under her belt to apply to actually work at Net Force herself. The day couldn't come too soon, as far as she was concerned. Net Force was policing the cutting edge of life, helping maintain the collective sanity and safety of an existence that was becoming increasingly virtual year by year. And if things went well, she would be working with some of the kids she was seeing recreationally now; they were all acutely aware that as far as Net Force was concerned, they were all prime intake material. All she and her group would have to do would be convince Net Force's Explorer liaison, James Winters, of that when the time came… and the best way to succeed was for everybody to sharpen their Net skills by working together in the virtual realm as much as they could, in what little time was left from school and the rest of real life.

But 'unreal life' had taken a backseat these last few weeks. 'Got to do something about that,' Megan muttered. Right now, though, there were more important matters to attend to. She poked the mail-sphere again. It closed, and Leif vanished.

'Door,' Megan said. Immediately a doorway appeared in the middle of the space at the 'bottom' of the amphitheater-an incongruous sight, since it looked like one of the doors in her house, wood frame, a six-paneled wooden door with a regulation knob. 'Destination?' her workspace management program said to her in its usual dulcet female voice.

'Wilma's space,' Megan said.

Everything but the door's 'frame' vanished. Through the frame, Megan could catch a glimpse of something