No, she had to be less judgmental about it. Good strategic analysis meant taking a concept apart into its smallest possible pieces, not trying to work with a large emotive whole. Troubled kids, Megan thought, usually under legal age. Sometimes, people who've been declared missing persons, or are otherwise in some kind of trouble with the law.
… Not exactly your optimum employees. These kids might not have a fixed address, and might not want one. They probably wouldn't have much of a work record… sometimes might not have documentation, or might not even be eligible to work, depending on where they are.
Now what kind of employer-
'Megan?'
She looked up at the sound of her father's voice, one of the exterior outputs for which she allowed her workspace to interrupt her. 'Yeah, Dad?'
'I've already eaten lunch twice,' said her father's voice, with a slight echo around it that made him sound a little like the Great and Powerful Oz. 'I would do it one more time just for the heck of it, but then your mother would start calling me 'The Gut That Walks' again. So can I please have my office back?'
'Oh, jeez, sorry Dad, I forgot where I was!' Megan got up from the desk, glanced around at the litter of frames, frozen videos and virteos, and still and solid images littering the floor of her amphitheater. 'Workspace manager, save everything… '
'Saved.' The voice then added, 'This is a prescheduled reminder.' And in her own voice it said, 'Answer the mail, Megan, it's lying around all over the place!'
She sighed. 'Later,' she said. 'Shut down-'
She blinked her implant off and found her father sitting in front of her and off to one side, in one of the few chairs in his office that wasn't covered with books laid out open and facedown. The sun had moved around the house, so that it was starting to come in these windows now; her father had drawn the blinds against the hot afternoon light. 'Heavy session?' he said. 'Or just catching up on the mail?'
'I wish,' Megan said. She stretched, feeling a sudden ache in her back that hadn't been there before. 'Dad, does this chair need to have its massage machinery checked?'
'They just tuned it last month, honey, when the support people came around to do the usual maintenance.' He looked thoughtfully at her. 'Any possibility that it's just stress?'
' 'Possibility'!' Megan said, and laughed, but there wasn't much humor in the sound.
'Anything you care to talk about?' her dad said as he sat himself down in the chair.
Megan took a deep breath, then shook her head. 'Not until I know for sure what I'm talking about,' she said. 'Is the other machine free?'
'For a miracle, yes,' her dad said. 'Your brothers both decided to go out at once… the place has been unnaturally quiet. But, Megan, why not have some lunch first. If you're going to worry about things, there's no point in doing it on an empty stomach.'
Her stomach growled emphatically. 'Yeah,' Megan said, 'not a bad idea… '
The simple fact of hunger distracted her more than Megan would have thought. Even when she was done eating a sandwich that would have astonished even Mike, she didn't much feel like going virtual again that afternoon. It was partly that Megan was conscious of spending a whole lot of her time in the Net lately, more than usual, but also an acknowledgement of a feeling of discomfort with Burt's basic problem. For all her occasional problems with her brothers and her parents, Megan was troubled by the concept of home as Burt must see it; as a place you didn't want to be, somewhere you wanted at all costs to escape from. Maybe if I'm going to figure this out, she thought, later that evening, while curled up with her father's immense copy of The Complete Dickens in a chair in the living room, I'm going to have to try to think more like someone who doesn 't see home as the center of life, the safe place… There were certainly enough people in Dickens' writing who felt that way, and Megan spent the rest of the evening immersed in David Copper- field, trying to get a handle on the insecurity and the pain.
The next morning was Monday morning, and for Megan, Burt's business and the matter of whatever was going on at Breathing Space retreated somewhat into the background, especially after she left a virtmail for Wilma about having seen Burt, and Wilma didn't answer it, though her system acknowledged that she'd read it. Maybe he's been in touch with her, finally, Megan thought. Maybe things have gone off the boil, a little… Which would be good. While the school year was fast winding down toward summer, there were still final exams to think about; in particular, the upcoming advanced- placement math final was giving her the creeps. She had been doing all right in classwork, and much to her relief had finally been getting to grips with the parts of calculus that had been eluding her, these last couple of months. But now, with the final exam only two weeks away, Megan was starting to get nervous. She left the virtmails piled up on her desk for the next couple of days, and spent practically all her free time immersed in integrals and other associated discomforts, telling herself that she would never need this junk once she was working for Net Force as a strategic operations analyst. And when that day comes I'll toast marshmallows over my burning math books…
It was fairly late Wednesday evening when she looked up from her fourth attempt to solve one particularly knotty integral and glanced at where Saturn was in the sky. She did a quick calculation in her head. My God, it must be eleven-thirty, Megan thought. Why am I still here torturing myself like this?
She looked down at the integral on the math-workbook datapad on her desk. 'Oh, go on,' Megan said in annoyance, 'show me the answer.'
Her handwriting on the surface of the pad disappeared, to be replaced by the tidy print of the workbook program's output. Megan leaned down to look at the result, started to swear, and then stopped herself. Too damn simple, she thought. Why do I always go at this stuff the complicated way? Sometimes it's genuinely easy. Why do I have trouble believing that?
She straightened up, and at the same moment heard the sound of someone 'knocking' for admission to her workspace. 'Yeah?' Megan said.
Wilma stepped suddenly out of the air into her space. That surprised Megan. Wilma wasn't terribly good at staying up late. 'Wil? What's up-'
But immediately, from the look on Wilma's face, Megan knew. 'Have you heard from Burt at all lately?' Wilma said, urgent.
'Uh, no, not since Sunday. I've been sort of busy-'
'He's gone,' Wilma said.
Megan let out a long breath. 'Gone where?'
'I don't know. I tried to get in touch with him a couple of times. Monday, Tuesday… He was there, but he wasn't available. I left him virtmails. No answer. And then, a little while ago, I queried them again… ' Wilma shook her head, and her face was a study in shock, the face of someone coming to terms with something she'd been trying hard to believe wouldn't happen for a long while yet. 'He took all his things this afternoon, they said, and left Breathing Space… '
Megan swallowed. Oh, God, did I make this happen sooner than it might have otherwise? she thought, flushing first hot and then cold with fear. So this is how you keep him from 'driving drunk99? Hey, nice work.
'Megan, what am I going to do? We've got to find him!' Wilma said.
'Yeah,' Megan said. 'We'll find him.' But she had no idea how.
Chapter 5
The rest of that evening was difficult. Megan found herself trying to reassure Wilma without actually lying to her. Yet she couldn't even say 'He'll be all right,' because she had no indication whatsoever that he would be. In fact, Megan couldn't say much of anything, between just letting Wilma talk her fears out, and herself dealing with the rush of sidelined concerns about Breathing Space and Burt that were now washing over her, full force. When Wilma finally headed back to her own space, after midnight, Megan sagged back in the chair behind her desk and just stared into space for a little while, thinking about what to do next.
'Space manager,' she said finally.
'Listening, Megan.'
'I want to talk to whatever administrative staff are available at the Breathing Space Net address I accessed
