Author's Note: This chapter is dedicated to a friend of mine who was killed by prejudice.

Chapter 41 Cookie and Phoenix

Salt, Pepper, and Jamie drove along a gravel country road with Pepper at the wheel. They had salvaged their old truck from the Flo*rMart parking lot, and Jamie had fixed it up so that it was now running smoothly. Jamie had wanted to take their new eighteen wheeler, but the authorities were still looking for either it or the motorcycle gang that had hijacked it and the new license plate could only offer them so much protection.

Pepper pulled up in front of a picturesque cottage with a huge barn about fifty meters to the right of it and a grand orchard behind it. Pepper shut down the engine and they all got out. Jamie grabbed his leather tool belt out of the back of the truck and strapped it around his hips. Then, they started walking to the cottage.

Before they were halfway to the door, a huge woman with jiggling breasts ran out to green them. "Salty! Peppie! It's been forever!" she said s she almost choked Pepper to death. Her massive tanned white arms made it look like he was being eaten by a wad of cookie dough.

"Hi Angela! This is our friend Jamie. He wanted to see that International Communications tower," Salt said, pointing to a giant, rusty steel structure that dwarfed not only the trees in their orchard, but their barn as well. It sat on the edge of their property, but still legally on their property.

"That old thing?" Angela said dismissively, "Why, I don't even think it works anymore. The last time someone came out here to service it must've been five, ten years ago. Monica could tell you. Monica?" she called to her wife.

A skinny black woman with hastily styled black hair with pink tips came to the door. She wrung her hands fretfully, worried that she had not done enough to make the house look presentable to guests. "Yes dear? Oh my! Salty, Peppie you sure have grown!" she said as she strode out to greet them. She looked somewhat distracted, trying to figure out how to get her cleaning finished before she invited them inside.

"Jamie here wants to know about that tower," Angela explained.

"Well, I was just a little girl when they put it up. A technician from Global - well, it was International back then - Communications came by every week to check on it. They also gave us checks for renting that square of land. Then one day the checks just stopped coming and so did the people. We asked for the money, but International just laughed at us and said that they weren't using it anymore, but it was ours to keep if we wanted it," Monica answered.

"Mind if we take a look?" Jamie asked.

"Be my guest," Monica replied enthusiastically, "take all the time you need. I have some things to take care of, so Cookie would you be a dear and show these fine young fellows the old rust bucket?"

Angela scrunched up her nose, and then said, "All right, but if that's what they really came here to see, there's no point in tidying up the house."

"Fooey! They'll be dying for a taste of civilization after staring at that thing." Monica scurried back inside her home to make it presentable.

"Sorry to put you through all this trouble," Salt apologized.

Angela smiled and started marching across the gravel driveway. Her farm boots crunched the rock as she went. "No trouble at all! We live so far from the city that having visitors of any kind is a treat!"

"But you're only twenty kilometers from town!" Pepper said.

They trudged past the barn and started walking through the orchard. The scent of fresh compost wafted into their nostrils.

"Have you been living under a rock? Gas prices are outrageous these days. With Global, Stellar, and Muraninite in charge of all the oil resources on the planet, it's a freaking cartel!" Angela ranted.

Salt and Pepper exchanged glances. Should we tell her? Not yet. Wait until she says more.

"Have you considered an electric car?" Jamie asked.

"Nobody makes 'em! Not good ones, anyway. Schroeder is the only one I know of, and all of his stuff falls apart, so I'm not going to spend a dime on his crap!"

"You could always make one yourself. They're really easy," Jamie suggested.

"Really? How?"

"Just take an old car with a dead engine, take out all the parts, and put in new ones."

"Hold it right there, kid. I'm not the mechanical type. I can't even fix the farm machinery. We call in someone else to do it for us."

"In that case, I could build you one. I have a whole team of mechanics working for me," Jamie bragged.

"Really? What do you do, anyway?" Angela asked with interest.

"We work in education," Jamie replied vaguely.

They reached the base of the rusty old tower and Jamie's anthracite eyes sparkled with excitement. He found a control panel at the base of the tower, picked the lock on it, and pried it open with some of the tools on his tool belt.

Meanwhile, Pepper answered her question. "Rakitan Industries is a company that designs custom lesson plans for any school that wishes to provide its students with a fulfilling hands-on learning experience," he quoted from the official corporate document, which was entirely bogus.

"So, why the sudden interest in this abandoned piece of junk?" Angela wondered.

"History," Salt said. "We have a client who wants to teach people how these things worked."

Angela looked straight through his lie with her strong epidote eyes. "No. What is this really about?"

Jamie, who was happily tinkering away at the controls, remained oblivious to the conversation. Salt and Pepper exchanged glances, devising a plan.

"Cookie, do you watch Global Communications news?" Pepper asked tentatively.

Angela made a face. "That garbage? Heck no! There are too many commercials on that channel. Even the news stories are commercials in disguise. I want to know what's really going on out there."

Salt played devil's advocate. "But Global Communications has all the facts and they check their facts before putting anything on the air. The other news stations just spit out urban legends and nonsense."

"What you call fact-checking I call censorship. Global Communications only runs stories that make the government look good," Angela said, setting her doughy chin as firmly as she could.

"Don't let the wrong person her you say that," Pepper said solemnly, "and don't ever say it online."

Angela blinked. "I knew it! Alright, kids. Spill. How do you know so much and what do you want with this old rust trap?" A flock of chickens puttered past them as she waited for an answer.

"Did you see the Flo*rMart story?" Salt asked.

Angela's jaw flapped open. "You did that, didn't you? I knew it couldn't be a motorcycle gang. That sounded fishy to me. So, you guys know Penguin? Can you get me her autograph? No, never mind. It would be foolish of me to keep something like that around the house. Anyway, can you tell her that I'm a big fan?"

Salt and Pepper chuckled.

"What's so funny?"

"She already knows," Pepper stated.

"What? But she's never even met me."

"It's not just you. It's everyone. She knows that she's a beautiful princess with an irresistible voice. Therefore, everyone has to be a fan," Salt explained.

"All done!" Jamie called from the rusty control panel of the tower. "It's in pretty bad shape, but it's not too bad. I'd like to come back later and see if I can preserve it for historical value," he said as he stuffed assorted wrenches, screwdrivers, and a small can of oil back into the various pockets of his tool belt.

"Jamie, you can drop the act. Angela's OK," Pepper said.

"You're going to use that tower to get Penguin better network coverage, aren't you?" Angela cried happily as she bounced up and down. Her whole body jiggled with excitement.

Jamie hesitated, then fire built in his body. "Well… yeah. This tower runs on old technology that can send video images to any TV within a fifty kilometer radius. The signal is then collected and strengthened by nearby towers. Now, I can program it to do this for just one channel or broadcast it on all frequencies. The really cool thing about this tower is that it does not have an IP address. Therefore, Global Communications won't be able to figure out where it came from. As long as we're discreet about it, anyway. The thing is that we don't need to broadcast on all channels because of the way Global Communications runs its cable series today. Subscribers set their televisions to channel four, and then everything comes in digitally through their cable box. Since government regulations state that nobody can broadcast anything on channel four, the cable box dominates. However, we can override the digital signal input with an analog signal from these towers. Global will think that we've done something to the cable boxes, and we should do something just to throw them off our trail. In any case, it should take them an awful long time to realize what really hit them."

Angela's epidote eyes glazed over when he mentioned digital and analog signals. She had no cable box, and never planned on getting one. She simply used an antenna to pick up local, independent television stations. When he finished talking, she said, "Why don't you come inside and have some cookies? I baked them fresh this morning."

"That sounds good," Jamie agreed.

The group trudged back to the cottage where they found Monica waiting for them with a big smile. The interior of the cottage was sparking clean and Angela's cookies were neatly laid out on a platter in the middle of a rich cherry table. Five glasses of fresh milk were also evenly spaced around the coffee table.

Angela laughed when she saw the display. "Darling, you outdo yourself every time. Boys, you should have seen what a pigsty this place was when we woke up. My girl here is a regular phoenix. Even if the place burned down, she would have it fixed up in under an hour."

Angela grabbed her wife's skinny waist, pulled her close, and gave her a big smooch.

Monica giggled, "Well, if it wasn't for those wonderful cookies you made, I wouldn't have felt guilty about leaving the place a mess. I couldn't let those gems be surrounded by squalor. Well boys, have a seat and eat!"

Hungry from their excursion, Jamie and the twins gobbled down cookie after cookie. Between bites, they helped Angela explain what they wanted to do with the old International Communications tower.

Monica's honey eyes grew wider as they spoke. "So, I've been wondering… Is Penguin her real name?" she asked at last.

"Is Salt my real name?"

"Of course not! It's… I forgot," Monica admitted with a sheepish grin.

"Well there you have it! The point is that nobody should be able to trace Penguin back to her family. Unfortunately, some people managed to identify her and she can't really go back to her family without getting turned into the authorities," Pepper said.

Monica blinked. "Then, do people call you something else when you're working with Noel?"

Salt shook his head. "It's different with us. Since none of the Noelites know out legal names in the first place and our nicknames can't be traced back to you, we didn't bother with a third identity."

"What about you, Jamie?" Monica asked.

Jamie gulped down the rest of the cookie he was munching and took a swig of milk to chase it. "That's my little secret. Anyway, some people never chose a code name, but that way the authorities will try to trace them back to someone with a totally different name. That should make them dizzy for a while… if we ever get caught."

"And what if you do?"

"Let's just say that it is better for both of us if you know nothing about that," Jamie said vaguely.

Monica leaned forward and looked firmly into his anthracite eyes. "OK. What if Cookie and I decided to join you and we get caught?"

Pepper looked distraught. "You can't do that. You have a perfect life out here on the farm. We can't ask you to give up that."

"Who said we were going to give up anything? We just want to support you, do what we can. If you're going to be using that tower on our property, we want to know what's going on," Monica insisted.

"The less you know, the better," Jamie pointed out. "The more we antagonize the government, the more they'll try to hunt us down and stop us."

"What if we use code names, too? I'll be Cookie and Monica can be Phoenix," Angela offered.

The three Noelites shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. "We'll ask Jo-er, Penguin. We'll ask Penguin," Pepper said at last.

"Yeah, the Diva has to approve everything," Salt added to cover for his brother's mistake. Even though Joan would have the final say rather than Penguin, Penguin was the only individual who had been publicly linked with Noel.

Cookie smiled pleasantly and said, "Well, just let us know what she says."

The rest of their visit was spent on lighter conversation. The visitors complimented Phoenix on her taste in decoration and jokingly tried to get Cookie to spill the secret behind her recipe. They parted ways with warm hugs and a promise to visit again soon.

Author's Note: I have no idea how broadcast towers, etc. actually work. However, since this is an alternate universe I felt comfortable taking the risk. If you know anything about these technologies and you would like to correct Jamie's long speech about them, please let me know!