'I think you're okay,' Bodo said, 'but better drop it. The walls have ears around here.' He looked resigned. 'Come to think of it, even the air has ears.'
Megan sat there looking around them and the deceptively tranquil surroundings, her mind racing. She very much doubted that the Breathing Space administrators themselves, having gone to considerable trouble to set up a place where vulnerable kids would be safe from attack, would be in any way responsible for these covert recruitments to… what? There was no telling, and she thought it was unlikely she was going to get any more out of Burt on the matter. 'So you're going to vanish all of a sudden,' she said, 'is that it? And I'm supposed to tell Wilma that this is all right, and there's nothing to worry about?'
Burt had the grace to look slightly guilty. 'I won't just 'vanish,' ' he said. 'I may drop out of sight for a few days at a time. I might do that anyway, you know. We're not prisoners here, they don't try to keep us against our will. Lots of kids come and go from the physical Breathing Space facilities every day without anyone getting all upset about it.'
This isn 't just anyone! This is one of my best friends, and your girlfriend, if you could just bring yourself to admit it! But plainly he couldn't. Megan looked down at Burt, sitting on his rock, and said, 'Burt, I think this is a really bad idea. I wish you'd reconsider.'
He looked up at her with an expression that hardened as she watched it. 'All my life,' Burt said, 'people have been telling me that my ideas were bad ones. Okay, sometimes they were. But even the good ones, they would claim were bad ones because they didn't agree with them. This is just more of the same.'
He got up. 'I'm telling you, so you can tell her. Don't worry about me. I'll be fine, and I'll come back in better shape than I left… a lot better.'
Burt turned his back and headed off, up the slope of the next hill. Bodo glanced after him, then over at Megan. It was a surprisingly commiserating look. 'I'll stay with him,' he said. 'As long as he lets me, anyway. He's a nice guy, even if he does kinda have a temper.'
'Uh, thanks,' Megan said. Bodo sketched her a little salute, and went off after Burt. She watched them vanish over the next hill-literally, 'vanish'-first Burt, invoking the optional 'invisibility' that the Breathing Space provided, and then Bodo, in his wake.
Megan stood there silent for a moment or so. He's just angry, he 's taking it out on the people around him, he 7/ think better of it eventually and stop this kind of thing, Megan thought.
But she doubted he'd do so very soon. Maybe that was her bad opinion of him talking. At the same time he obviously hadn't thought about the effect his actions were going to have on Wilma… or if he had, Burt didn't care.
I can't let this just happen. I can't. It would be like letting someone drive drunk. Anything that happens to Burt, or to anyone who gets caught up in whatever he's going to do, would be on my head… and I couldn 't stand it afterward.
Megan turned and made her way back to the doorway to her own space. Once there, she vanished the doorway and sat down at her desk under the hard back sky of near- Saturn space, leaned on her elbows, laced her fingers together, put her chin down on her hands, and thought hard.
'Workspace manager…'
'Listening, Megan.'
'I want all the information you can find about the history, management, and structure of the Breathing Space youth refuge facilities.'
'Finding that information for you now. Limiting parameters?'
'None.' It was going to land a terrible amount of information on her desk to be sifted through. But Megan had a feeling that buried somewhere in it all could be a hint of exactly what Burt was getting into, something that could help her help him.. and she wouldn't know what it was until she saw it.
Her first and simplest impulse-to go straight to the Breathing Space people and 'blow the whistle' about what was happening-Megan had already rejected out of hand. All she had at the moment was hearsay evidence, and even though she felt certain Burt was telling her the truth, that wasn't going to count for much with the administrators of Breathing Space. She would at least need evidence of one of these 'street corners,' and an indication of how it worked, and she had neither. She might have to think about adapting a 'mask,' a false virtual identity, to see if she could find anything out that way. But that was very much a last-resort idea.
'Ready,' said Megan's workspace. 'Warning: material comprises the equivalent of some four thousand typed pages.'
Megan smiled grimly. 'Let's go.'
Rhea went around Saturn at least once while Megan sat there, reading window after window of text that scrolled through the air in front of her in hanging windows, watching flat movies and stereo screenshots and fiill-virt interviews and pieces of documentaries play themselves out on the floor of her amphitheater. She plowed through all kinds of data; description, commentary, interviews, editorials, testimonials, even precis of court cases-for there had been quite a few of these over the years, people trying to get at their estranged kids by (for instance) claiming that the Breathing Space people had brainwashed them, or even kidnapped them. Other people had tried bribery, or even blackmail, to subvert Breathing Space staff and get them to reveal the physical locations of runaways, so that they could be snatched. The environment itself had been hacked into spectacularly once in the very early part of the century, when virtuality as people knew it now was just getting started, then it had been briefly and disastrously exploited by a ring of criminals specializing in child slavery, and worse. Since then, the Breathing Space organization had made the reorganization and security of its virtual spaces its highest priority, next to the care of the kids those spaces sheltered. The Breathing Space 'sheltered environment' was now as watertight and secure as anything could be these days… or so it was publicly claimed.
But Bodo was right. Where there was a will to make an alternate way in, or out, someone would manage it. If hacking talent had ever been hard to acquire since computers began, it certainly wasn't now. Most kids knew a whole lot about the guts of the Net at a very early age, since so much emphasis was put on it in school, both as a learning tool and a way to help you with your homework… not to mention all the rest of your life. A lot of kids, like those who got seriously into simming, learned a great deal about systems analysis and how to best exploit the hardware/software interface for their own hobbies and pursuits. It wouldn't take that much time, Megan supposed, to find out a fair amount about how to subvert the kind of safeguards that Breathing Space must have around its virtual territory. And like any guarded space, Megan thought, it would be most vulnerable to attack from within. From the very people it's supposed to be protecting.
The problem is that nobody really likes to admit they need protection. She put her head down on her hands again for a moment. It implies that you're weak. Pretty soon you're looking for ways to prove you don't need any protection after all, you can take it, you're just using this place to get a little rest… and meanwhile, you 're bending the rules, and the system structure, so that you can do things your way.
Control… it was all about control. 'The great adolescent dilemma' was the phrase used by one of the editorial writers who'd experienced Breathing Space from the inside, briefly, and talked to some of the kids there. Well, maybe he was overdramatizing. But there might be something to it. No teenager Megan knew had been able to avoid moments when they thought they would just burst, or go crazy, because of pressure from parents or teachers not to assert themselves, not to do something unique or even slightly dangerous that they really wanted to do. The urge to get away on your own, ideally with enough money to make it pleasant, the urge to run your life… it seemed, sometimes, that as it got stronger and stronger with the approach of adulthood, your parents stepped on it harder and harder. Even the relatively light rein on which Megan knew her parents 'rode' her sometimes irked her out of all proportion to the actual control. She had never left home, but there had been times when the thought had crossed her mind, all right. How much more was someone like Burt going to feel the urge…?
Meanwhile, none of this solved the basic problem. What was this 'work' that Burt was so interested in?
And why would anyone be offering kids in Breathing Space work? Though Breathing Space itself as a charitable organization was a wonderful idea, Megan very much doubted that any altruism was behind these offers. The world was just too full of people busy taking advantage of other people, and the fact that the approaches were being made in secret made Megan even more suspicious. Surely anyone legitimate would simply go to the environment's administrators and offer to help employ their clients when they got out. It would be wonderful publicity… for anyone who wanted publicity.
Well let's try to approach this logically. Just what has Breathing Space got?
Runaways.
