shade of the little forests and glades that dotted them, she could see people walking at a distance: tiny figures, some in pairs or groups, but the greatest number of them alone.
After a few minutes, when she still didn't see Burt, Megan sat down underneath the shade of a huge conifer of some kind and made herself comfortable on the pine needles. She knew that the system would have alerted him to her presence; if he wasn't hurrying about showing up, well, that was Burt for you. There was always the landscape to look at, and more to the point, the landscape architecture. She was running her fingers through the pine needles and wondering what modus the programmer had used to create them all, fractal or unary, when above her someone said, 'You been waiting long?'
Burt was standing there, and there was someone else behind him that Megan didn't recognize. She got to her feet, dusting the pine needles off her, and was impressed by the way they stuck to her, as real ones would have. 'Burt…' she said.
'One of the counselors snagged me just as I was on my way here,' Burt said. 'Sorry.'
'It's no problem. Who's your friend?'
'This is Bodo. Met him a little while after I got in. He's been here on and off for a while.'
'Hi, there,' Megan said, and she held out a hand to Bodo. He shook it. He was an unusual-looking guy, maybe seventeen, shorter than Burt, swarthy, a little heavy- set, and wearing one of the new contoured whole-body slicks that were so popular at the moment. Megan thought the shoulderpads and thighpads were a little silly, but she'd been keeping this opinion to herself, since so many of the kids at school thought the fashion too wonderful for words. Bodo, though, somehow managed to make the slick look good instead of just lumpy in new and interesting places. Maybe it was his hairstyle, which, though it looked strange with the ultra-new slick, suited him very well. It was a retropunk style with a long 'tail' down the back and a close-cropped, crew-cuttish front, and the tail was dyed bright blue. 'My blue streak,' Bodo said, grinning, as he saw Megan noticing it.
'Bodo,' Burt said, 'is one of the semiresident geeks.'
She smiled at that. 'What do they need geeks for, here?'
'Geeks make the world go around,' Bodo said. 'As if you don't know. You look a bit geekish yourself, Megan.'
'Me?' She grinned.
'I saw you studying the landscape. You do sims, don't you?'
'I've been doing one lately,' Megan said, 'but I'm probably not good enough to be counted a geek. Not for a while yet.'
'There speaks the wise woman,' Bodo said. 'Someone who knows that geekdom is worth aspiring to.'
'Wanna walk?' Burt said.
'Sure.'
They strolled out from under the trees and downslope, to where a little creek meandered among the smaller hills. 'Didn't think I'd see you back here again so soon,' Burt said.
'Well…'
'Megan,' Burt said. 'You don't have to play nice-nice with me. I know you don't think that much of me.'
Is it so obvious? Megan thought, in slight panic. Oh, well… 'Burt,' she said, 'look, we may have our differences… but it's not like I don't worry about you anyway.'
He shrugged, sighed. 'Okay,' he said. 'I thought you would have brought Wil with you, though.'
'She's a big girl. She can decide when she wants to visit by herself,' Megan said. 'And I had some concerns that I wanted to explore without worrying about how she was going to react.'
'Uh-huh,' Burt said. He shot a glance at Bodo. 'I told you,' he said.
'Told him what?'
'You were always quick to pick up on the unspoken stuff,' Burt said. 'You know. 'Work.' '
'That was exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.'
They paused by a bend in the stream, looked into the water. Under the overhang of the bank, in a still brown shady spot in the water, Megan could see a gigantic brown trout that would have made her brother Mike run for his fishing rod. 'Thought so,' Burt said. 'Look, Megan… you should tell Wilma not to worry.'
'Why should I tell her that? You can tell her yourself.'
'Because I may not be here to do it.'
Megan blinked. 'After all that, yesterday… you're not even going to stay here long enough to relax and get yourself sorted out a little?'
'I've had all the sorting out I need,' Burt said. 'There are things going on out in the big world. I want to get on with them.'
Megan swallowed. She could just imagine what Wilma's reaction to this news was going to be. 'Burt, doing just what? It would make me feel a lot better if I had some idea what you were getting into.'
He and Bodo glanced at each other again. 'I can't get into it, Megan,' Burt said. 'I promised I wouldn't.'
'Promised who?
Burt sat down by the stream on one of a number of boulders that might have been dropped there by some ancient glacier, if this landscape had been real. 'Look… I can't get into it, that's all. It's like I told Wilma-and even then, maybe I was saying too much. I've found out about some really interesting work I can be doing, and I'm going to go start doing it in the next few days, if everything works out all right.'
'Just where did you find out about this?'
'Oh, there are a lot of little nooks and crannies in this virtual environment,' Bodo said, smiling slightly. 'Including some that the Breathing Space people don't know about.'
Megan looked at him dubiously. 'Come on, Megan, don't act so shocked,' Burt said. 'Is there a single virtual space on this planet that hasn't been compromised at some point or another? Or bent into some new shape by the people who used it, some shape that the builders never imagined? Heck, you can make a case for the idea that the whole old Internet system grew out of the machinations of ten or twenty people who wanted to use their college computers to play starship shoot-'em-up games with other students a thousand miles away. Definitely not what those first network designers had in mind for their machines! This is just more of that kind of thing.'
'Goes on all the time,' Bodo said, glancing around him. 'This place is full of holes. Some of them were left there accidentally by the programmersThey were good, but they weren't omnipotent. Others…' He smiled a secretive smile.
'Others were made, you're saying,' Megan said. 'By someone from outside.'
'Not always,' Bodo said. 'Some of them were drilled out from the inside. For one thing, there's more than one way in and out of here.'
Megan raised her eyebrows, trying to conceal how worried she was feeling. 'That's not what they say.'
'Shows what 'they' know,' Bodo said. 'But there's always a back door… that's what the programmers say. With a little practice, a little ingenuity, you can always find one.'
'But why?' Megan said. 'If the whole point of this place is protecting the kids using it-'
'Oh, yeah, it's good for that,' Burt said. 'No one's going to deny it. But at the same time, sometimes things can get a little.. stifling. You know? All the counselors, monitoring your every word to see if you're coming along.. Oh, of course they do, Megan, it's in the contract, we all know it. It's the one tradeoff they do require, a little. Privacy for safety.'
'And sometimes,' Bodo said, 'some of us find a way around it. Not obviously, mind you. But there are little pockets in this system that its sysops and programmers don't know about, and some of us have found ways to exploit them. 'Quiet' spots, like the reverse of the whispering spots under a dome-places where you can't be heard. This is one of them… Or else people devise ways to get 'out' into the Net without the monitors catching us and monitoring what we do or where we go.'
He smiled. It was an unusually angelic smile from someone whose looks proclaimed him as being on the outer edge of things, or at least headed that way.
'It's like in the old days,' Burt said, 'and like it is now. If you can't meet other kids your age at home without being eavesdropped on, you go out and meet them on the corner. There are little 'street corners' here and there, scattered around Breathing Space…' He swallowed, for once looking just faintly nervous. 'Megan, look, I can't go into a lot of details,' Burt said. 'But the door swings both ways. There are people who know about the street corners… and they meet you there and talk business. It's good business, and it pays enough to be interesting. It's nothing dangerous, nothing illegal. And that's all I'm going to say about it. I may have said too much as it is… '
