006 — Biorhythms

By the time they reached the next most-northern county, Ro's stomach began disagreeing with its emptiness. She tried putting her hands over it and telling it to quiet down, but of no use; stomachs rarely follow the orders of their owners. Zee flashed her expressions of semi-amusement. In the repose of her stomach, as if for a moment abiding, Zee suggested Ro investigate eatery destinations on the computer. Ro wrestled it from the crowded back seat of the hatchback, and brought it upon her knees. Hooking it up to the car's computer, their location appeared almost immediately in a certain software program set up for such a thing. Restaurants of all varieties popped up on the map. As she often did, Ro lamented that this form of doing things was considerably new, only developed in the last three months, and wished they'd had it two years ago. Then again, in the recess following Knossos, much had changed. Necessity, that constant mother of invention, propelled their 2041 model Audi hatchback convertible into a futuristic car that might've earned Zee a paying position with the Audi corporation, had he been anything but a wanted fugitive.

Stopping in the parking lot of Ro's chosen restaurant, a local place with eyelet curtains in the windows, Zee went around to the trunk and opened it. Buried beneath satchels of Ro's clothes, a couple of pillows, and discarded pieces of the vehicle itself, Zee unearthed the hidden door he'd built into the hollow area where the spare tyre waited use.

'We need some cash,' he told Ro, standing at his side. She was trying desperately to keep trash and pillows from blowing out the trunk, as the wind was gusty along this treeless, open hilltop.

Fumbling with the pillows, Zee finally coming to her aid, Ro let her forefinger slide down the glowing white and blue strip at the small safe's door. Zee had built it from forerunning knowledge of biorhythms. It only opened with Ro's biorhythmic pattern, no one else's. The strip turned from blue to green, and the door slid aside. A stack of green cash cards was huddled inside. They certainly had plenty of money, but there was a reason for the cash and the safe.

The National Security Agency had provided Zee, at the very beginning, with a cred card of unlimited value. Unlimited meant unlimited: after each use, the card refilled itself, as though nothing had ever been taken from it. It could be used anywhere, for the smallest amount of money to the largest. Only one hitch: The NSA could track that cred card, each use showing up in their systems. They'd know, almost instantly, exactly where Zee's cred card was. Where that cred card was, so was Zee—and likely Ro.

Long ago, long before Knossos, almost around the time they discovered who Dr Eli Selig was, Zee and Ro had found a way around the cred card issue. The cred card could also buy cash, and lots of it. Brilliant, green, useful, untraceable cash cards. That was the secret around using Zee's cred card every time they turned around. In their tipsy, post-Knossos, post-Selig world, Zee and Ro began buying very large quantities of cash cards at one time, typically while leaving one city they'd been in for a rather long period of time, until the cash ran low. This change in their way of doing things had caused Zee to build the safe. He'd had the idea of a biorhythmic lock for some time, but it wasn't until their last meeting with Bucky that Zee was able to get his hands on the proper hardware to bring his plans to fruition.

And, to Ro's astonishment, Zee put her in charge of their finances. She kept track of them in her mind as well as using a computer program, all their expenses, from the cheapest cup of java to the purchase of the car in 2042—and everything between. Ro took pride in this, as Zee had appointed her the task, and she didn't want to fail him. She surprised herself by being very good at it.

'How much are you taking out?' she asked very quickly.

Zee counted the three green plastic cards in his hands, the magnetic strips all facing to the left. 'Three hundred. That should be enough to last us a couple days.'

Ro nodded complacency. 'That'll leave us with—' the calculation whipped into her head like magic, 'fifteen hundred and eighty, then.' The safe was locked at her touch, and she closed the boot with a whoosh. Ro took one card proffered by Zee, murmuring a thanks. The two of them were still separate entities, and tried, occasionally, when warned to do so, to remember this fact. She carried cash whenever having the pocket or handbag for it, should they ever find themselves without the other, and cash was something nice to have when trying to recover from being lost. Zee carried the most with him, Ro generally a third of what he had. So far, and she crossed her fingers as she thought of it, mentally conjuring the image also of knocking generously on wood, she had never needed the emergency cash. She'd become so disciplined with money that spending it on frivolous items brought guilt to her guts.

As it was off-hours for lunch time, a little after one-thirty in the afternoon, Zee brought Ro's computer into the restaurant. Once the host procured a table by the window, with a cheery prospect of a lazy hill that sloped into a boscage, Zee used his wireless connection to speak with the computer. He tried to use his newly-acquired wireless networking with any computer when in public. It severed the chance someone in a Ground Wire or other location might notice his data cord protruding from his man-shaped wrist. Wireless had the added advantage of being controlled better, not to mention protected by far greater security measures than a poky old standard line.

Ro ate a hamburger much higher than her mouth, along with seasoned fries, commenting every once in a while on the state of Zee's rather exasperating silence. Every thirty seconds she'd be at his throat, not literally, just to ask if he'd found anything useful. He kept putting off the answer. At last, twenty-two minutes later, Ro in the process of polishing off a three-tiered piece of dessert the server had called "buckeye pie", Zee let the lid of the computer snap closed, and gaped at her with thoughtful eyes of deep blue, a shade that Ro often wanted to call "occidental blue", after the colour of the sky in the western states.

Ro froze a bite of cake just before her mouth. Her eyebrows lifted. 'Well?' She knew, by the thickness gathering between them, that whatever he said next would be very profound—or a very profound lie passed off as truth.

Zee brought his hands together across the top of the computer, and waited, patient with the run of eager thoughts. 'There are two good things and one bad thing I was able to discover. So far. Though, bear in mind I have just gone through a small portion of the acquired files.'

'All right.' Ro dropped the fork, still with its small bite of cake on it; she was too unsettled to think of eating. 'What's the bad news?'

'Selig has no family.'

Ro snorted, laughter crossing with disgust. 'I told you!' It couldn't help flying out of her mouth. She did tell him Selig would be too busy to procreate. The thought of little white-haired, glasses-wearing, white-lab-coat-wearing wee Seligs progenies vanished indelicately. 'There's good news in that?'

'Good news is,' he paused a moment, almost unable to believe it himself, 'we're standing in Selig's home state.'

This brought Ro into a delighted guffaw. She snorted again at the tail end of the abounding rapture. 'He really is from Ohio! I was only joking about that!' This statement alluded to a joke she had made once that Selig was likely to be from one of the most boring states in the nation, and Ro's mind had immediately gone to Ohio.

Zee, however, with his hands clasped in front of him, his nose slightly raised in the air, looked snobbishly down at her. He found no amusement in it. 'Ohio has produced a great number of presidents. Not as many as Virginia, but more than any other current state. Not to mention an astronaut, some of your favourite actors, notable personalities in the business world, and that dessert your eating.'

She waved the fork at him, telling him to get on with it when her mouth couldn't. It was too full of pie. Had her mouth not been full, she may have admitted that Ohio knew pies.

'There is little we could do to track Selig down. If he does have family, they're likely to be distant relatives who'd know nothing about him.'

Swallowing the last piece of pie, Ro set down the fork and pushed the plate to the end of the table. 'What else? That can't be all.'

'It isn't.' He looked outside to gather the information into words that could be spoken. 'I downloaded some information on the original Zeta project team. Like the old hologram picture I got from the NSA—you remember.'

'Yeah,' Ro tried not to make the agreement sound sombre. But the day he'd acquired that holographic file was the same day they'd met. It seemed like a long time ago, as though many bitter winters and scentless springs and forgotten summers had passed since. 'And?'

'We never did discover the identities of all those faces.'

Ro's brow bent in the middle. That was true. They hadn't. When Selig died, with no way to clear Zee's name, it had become unimportant. Most things that'd been important before were now transcendent thoughts that brought nothing but misery and woe. If someone had wanted to prove Zee was innocent, and had the evidence to prove that innocence, why hadn't that someone come forward by now?

'And you've found out some names?' Ro put her heavy chin in her palms, gazing at Zee. He looked maudlin and—oddly enough for a robot—a little tired, as though the edges of his hologram were beginning to show signs of wear and age. Perhaps she wasn't the only one getting older.

'Yes, I did,' he said, trying to look less bleak and more hopeful. 'The short one, in the front—'

'With the curly hair? Well, what hair he had.'

'That is he. His name is Dr Smart.'

'Dr Smart?' Ro grinned and slipped into a fit of laughter again. This time Zee couldn't feign insouciance; he hinted a smile. Ro waved her arms. 'Let me guess his first name! Is it Eugene?'

Zee shook his head.

'Linus?'

He shook his head.

'Lionel?'

He shook his head.

'Lawrence?'

He shook his head, now growing exasperated. 'You are obsessed with "L" names! His name is—'

'Oh, I know! It's Xavier! We haven't met an Xavier yet, and it has such a nice, collegiate sound. Is it Xavier?'

'No,' Zee coughed out a breath that sounded, to someone trained to his kinematics like Ro, like a laugh. 'Will you stop guessing and allow me to tell you?'

Biting her lips to keep from smiling, she poised herself.

'His name is Dr Samuel Smart. I assume his friends call him Sam.'

'Sam,' repeated Ro. 'That sounds so normal. Could be the name of this restaurant's owner. Or a detective. So, what's Sam Smart up to these days? Did you find out?'

'He was one of Selig's closest friends. One of the few. Eli Selig didn't have many close to him, and none of them he trusted explicitly. Not even, so it seems, Miss Donoso.'

Ro's mouth pursed as if often did when Andrea Donoso, Selig's assistant, was mentioned. Zee had been able to find out, by some hacking into the NSA's systems, that Andrea Donoso remained on the government payroll. As to what she was doing, it wasn't on file. She existed, but her work did not. Ro had nauseous, indescribable feelings that Andrea Donoso was carrying on Selig's super-secret operations somewhere they'd never be able to find her, perhaps on another Knossos.

As Ro heard Mr Morgan say, back when she was still a little girl in Oregon, Andrea Donoso was on her shit-list. A list that was growing and growing every day. Agent James Bennett was at the top, followed by the other agents whose names she knew, a few only with faces, then Andrea—some days even Bucky. Though he'd wended his way to the bottom, sometimes eradicated from it, because he genuinely wanted to help them, but with his hands proverbially tied into the Tech Underground, there wasn't much he could do.

'I came across some of their e-mails,' Zee went on, paying no mind to Ro's inattention. 'They were talking about me as late as last June last year, 2043.'

'What about you?'

'About what I'd been doing. Speculation. Dr Smart had asked Dr Selig if he really believed I was a terrorist.'

'What'd Selig say?'

Zee shrugged, acting this out much better than he might have a year ago. Ro idly wondered if Selig would be proud of how well Zee blended in to the population around him. 'That letter seems to have no response, or it was wiped from the hard drive. That was the last letter that Dr Selig received from Dr Smart. Then . . . Knossos went under. The end. If Selig answered, I'll never know.'

Ro rubbed her chin, looking out the window as though it would help clear her thoughts. 'Maybe not.'

Zee's head perked. 'What do you mean?'

'That's just the Knossos servers, yeah? I mean that you downloaded those e-mails from.'

'Yes.' He wasn't following. Usually he could, but not this time.

'Well, what about the receiving end? What if the e-mail was left on Dr Smart's servers? It might still be there, wouldn't it?'

In a paroxysm of hope, Zee grabbed her hands and squeezed.

'All we'd have to do,' she started, 'is find Dr Smart's office, do a little of what we're good at, and find that e-mail. So, where's Dr Smart?'

Zee didn't let go of her hands, and now he held her gaze as though dumbstruck. 'That's what I was trying to tell you before. Selig and Dr Smart were close friends.'

'Yeah—so?'

'Since childhood.'

Ro gripped his fingers back, a rush of feeling clouding her emotions. 'Oh.'

'They went to school together. And Dr Smart teaches now. He's a professor of biochemistry.'

'And so where is Dr Smart?'

Zee whispered it, finding it unbelievable still. 'Antioch College. Yellow Springs, Ohio.'