0846 hours
Sunday December 3 2006
Escondido
The house was hopping for a Sunday morning, Eddie observed as he sipped his coffee at the dining table. The whole tribe had got up more or less at the same time, a minor miracle on a weekend morning, and Anna was fixing mass quantities of breakfast, bustling back and forth loading everybody up with their favorites. He could see her in the kitchen, zinging around like a pinball as she fixed three or four different morning meals to satisfy her finicky brood. Smoke rose out of the toaster; she rushed to it, popped the blackened bread, trashed it, and inserted four more slices, making a tiny adjustment to the dials.
"Anybody get a birthday gift for Mr. Lynch yet?" Rox sat beside Eddie, munching on some sliced fruit. "I'm stuck. He really is a guy who has everything." She looked at Bobby. "I spose you're as in the dark as I am."
Bobby sipped his coffee. "Actually, I already got mine. But he'll have to wait till spring for it. Weekend reservation for two at a whitewater camp in Colorado."
"Heck of a gift for a guy's sixtieth birthday." Then Bobby's whole statement registered. "Wait. Two? As in…"
Sarah's eyes shone. "You're giving him a weekend of Dad-and-Lad, aren't you? Bobby, I'm proud of you."
"Well, we'll see how it works out. We might not be speaking by the time we get back."
"You will. You've both come a long way since you met."
Eddie eyed Kat, and wondered if she was imagining a weekend alone with the L-man far from home. "Kat. You come up with anything?"
"I haven't bought it yet, but I've got my eye on an art book. You know, the kind that covers the coffee table when it's open? It's full of photographs of works the owners won't allow to be physically copied. Goes on sale tomorrow at Barnes and Noble."
He nodded. Figures Miss Meticulous would have her bases covered. Probably been thinking about what to get him for months, and saving for it, too. Those books can cost as much as a used car. "How bout you, Sarah?"
The Apache Princess looked down into her tea. "I don't know." Did he imagine it, or did her cheeks darken a little? Bobby stared into his cup as well, and anyone with eyes could see his blush. Eddie stifled a grin. What he wants most from both of them, they can't give him yet.
"This is a big month for birthdays in my family," Sarah said, artlessly changing the subject. "My oldest sister's birthday is the day after his, and my next-to-youngest's is eleven days later. I wish I could send them something."
The group's bright mood dimmed for a moment. Sending Sarah's family an unsigned postcard might be enough to get her sibs and parents taken hostage, if the puppet masters at IO found out and suspected she was in contact.
Rox's elbow dug into his ribs. "What about you, Grunge?"
He shrugged. "I'm stuck too."
Sarah nibbled at an orange slice. "You wouldn't think a person who can turn spit into gold would have trouble coming up with a gift for anybody."
"He's already richer than Midas. I turn one of his guns into gold, he might brain me with it."
Anna returned to the table with a coffeepot and a plate heaped with scrambled eggs. "Toast coming up in a minute, I hope. The toaster's acting up."
Eddie took the plate from her hand. "That the one you got for opening a bank account? Not up to your usual standards, mama-droid."
"No." She didn't smile at his teasing.
A warning sounded in his head. Now that he thought about it, Anna had been kind of quiet and serious for the past few days. Maybe she was having trouble finding a gift too. "Anna. You got anything for him yet?"
Anna poured a warmup into Bobby's cup. "I have a couple ideas in mind," she said, finally smiling, "But nothing I care to discuss with a teenage boy, even if he did turn eighteen this-"
Her hand jerked, slopping a quarter cup of hot coffee into Bobby's plate, some of it splashing onto his shirt. He jumped up.
Anna was mortified. "Bobby, I'm so sorry. Are you all right?" She picked up his plate.
"No problem, Mom, just need to change my shirt. Are you all right?"
She turned to the kitchen. "Fine."
Bobby gave her an odd look, but left to change. Anna took his plate to the sink and scraped it off into the disposal. As she did, the toaster gave out a grinding buzz, and four slices of bread popped partway out and stuck.
Anna struck like a snake, bringing her fist down on the hapless machine. It folded around her hand, half jumping off the table. Pieces flew off, and sparks popped. Then the wall GFCI kicked out, its reset telltale glowing.
Conversation stopped. The girls turned to the kitchen with wide eyes.
Anna's face was a mask. "I despise machines," she said slowly, "that don't perform to design intent." She turned and left the room, but not before Eddie saw her fist twitch sharply, just as the coffeepot had a minute earlier.
In the ground-floor bedroom that she shared with Jack, just down the hall from the kitchen, Anna sat on the bed, staring at her right hand. There were no tremors. It felt normal. She opened and closed it, then bent the fingers one at a time. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Her hand twitched, twisting. She gasped. There was no warning, just a sudden, uncontrolled movement. Is it cyclic, at least? Can I anticipate it that way? She tried to tag the moment the malfunction had occurred, but somehow the event hadn't logged. She set a timer and began counting milliseconds. She had to get a handle of some sort on this problem; what if it happened while she was holding a gun, or just a knife in the kitchen?
What if it happened while she was holding Jack?
Stop it. You're panicking. The spasm, or whatever this is, it's not violent enough to do him real harm. But till you fix this, you're going to have to be careful where you touch him.
How was she going to fix this?
Get real, robot. You're not a bio, you don't heal. Something broken stays broken. Like you told Caitlin
Her hand jerked, taking her by surprise. How long had it been? She checked the elapsed time, and nodded. At least now, she wouldn't be taken by surprise.
If it was just a mechanical problem, might Jack know someone? Did they dare risk their security by letting an outsider work on her? How might they arrange it to avoid disclosing vital information?
Perhaps whoever Jack had hired to build that monstrosity in the basement would have the necessary skills, she thought. It must be someone Jack trusted, and they would already have some familiarity with somewhat compatible hardware. Bringing them in wouldn't widen the circle of people who knew about them, hopefully. How much would Jack have to pay for their silence? IO would pay any price for important information about the 'Twelve-Fives,' as they called them. How could they
Her hand spasmed. She gasped again. There had been no warning. She checked her timer. It was functioning normally. But it hadn't warned her of the impending twitch as she had instructed.
Or had it?
"Anna?" Roxanne's voice through the door. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," she said tersely, checking her internal message logs. "Finish your breakfast." Were there gaps? She wasn't sure.
"We're done eating."
"Well then, go do something else," she said. "What do you want?"
A pause. "Nothing. We just wanted to check on you. Sorry." Several shoe scrapes on the stone floor, as whoever else was outside the door turned away.
She went quickly to the door and opened it. All five of them were in the hall, looking uneasy. Bobby still stood by the door. "Kids. I'm sorry. I'm just… feeling distracted right now."
Bobby said, "Is there anything-"
"No. I'll be out soon to clean up. I just need some time alone right now. Go enjoy your Sunday, all of you." She withdrew and shut the door.
2112 hours
Jack lay in bed with his wife like nested spoons, holding her in his arms. His hand ran down the stiff shoulder, slid down the bare arm, and rested on the slender hip. "I don't usually make comparisons," he said to the back of her head. "But tonight was, far and away, better than I've had with any other woman."
The shoulder trembled. "But not… not up to our usual standard, was it? We didn't… disappear into each other." He couldn't hear it or see it, but he knew she was crying. "It's starting, Jack. I imagined it happening so many ways, but not like this…"
He pulled her to him and held her tight. He ran his fingers through the short blonde hair. "Shh. It's going to be all right."
"No." She shivered. "It's never going to be right again."
Up on the roof, Eddie stood alone among the potted greenery on the terrace just below the pool, and looked up at the stars, partly occluded by unseen clouds. He took a deep breath and touched his finger to the phone button, entering the final digit of the number he'd memorized eight months before. He said softly, "Here we go," and pressed the send key.
The phone picked up partway through the first ring, startling him, but not as much as the voice on the phone: Anna's. "Eddie Grunge, why are you calling this number? Put her on the line."
"Uh. Actually, she's not here, Red. With me, I mean. I don't think she'd let me call if I told her first. And how did you know it was me?"
"I recognized your breathing. And I'm not Three. I'm Five."
"How did you… Scratch that. Red told you all about me, everything she knows, right?"
"That's one way of putting it. It would be equally accurate to say I was with her when she met you. How did you get this number? I know you didn't write it down."
"Hey, you don't have to have a computer in your head to remember a little string of numbers."
A second's pause. "Noted. It seems we underestimated you somewhat. Why are you calling then, if not on her behalf?" Something in her voice told him it had better be good.
"I am calling on her behalf. Just not with her knowledge."
"Explain."
"She's having problems. Breakdowns. She's trying to hide it from us, but she can't hide everything. She won't talk to you about it, because she's afraid you'll do the Vulcan Mind Meld on her."
"The what?"
"You know. A fly lands on one of your noses, you all swat."
"Clever." Her tone of voice told him she didn't think it was clever at all. "So, she's malfunctioning. And instead of exploiting her weakness, you want to see her repaired, even against her will. Enough to talk to us about it, even though we frighten you."
He didn't bother denying it. "I'm sure she wants to be whole and well. She just won't lose herself to do it. She won't rejoin your gestalt."
"What are the symptoms?"
"Her hand twitches all the time."
"Be specific. How does it move?"
He cast back, making full use of his photographic memory. "Her right thumb suddenly turns inward about thirty degrees, hard enough to involve her elbow and shoulder if her hand is raised. She doesn't have any control over it, and it seems to take her by surprise, even though it happens regularly."
"How regularly? Is it intermittent or cyclic? How many milliseconds between?"
"Five, I've got a camera in my head, not a stopwatch."
"Is there a difference in the interval you can notice?"
"No. It's cyclic. Which makes it weird that she's the only one who can't see the next twitch coming."
"The twitch and the lack of awareness are parts of the same problem. Is the interval more than ten seconds?"
"Yes."
"Less than five minutes?"
"Yes."
"Less than one minute?"
"I don't think so. Not sure."
"Any other physical impairments?"
"I think so, but she's keeping them from us."
A pause. "Behavioral changes?"
"She seems depressed and moody."
Another moment of silence on the other line; he imagined another emotionally arrested creature like Three trying to digest his observation. "She's unpredictable then. Does that make you afraid of her?"
"It makes me afraid for her."
Yet another moment of silence; he guessed he was giving the machine-Annas some new things to think about. "The problem is software, not hardware. We can fix her without gestalt, but there's a learning curve involved. It may take some time. And she'll have to come to us."
He shifted the phone in his hand. "That won't be easy. I don't know how I'd talk her into it."
"That seems simple enough. Tell her mate."
Tuesday December 5 2006
0700
San Diego
"I can't believe I'm doing this." Anna stood stiffly in the airport lounge, refusing to sit. She was at Lindbergh Field, the private aviation section of San Diego International, accompanied by Jack, Eddie, and Bobby. She'd said her goodbyes to the girls at home; gathering the whole family in the airport seemed an unreasonable risk.
"I can't believe you didn't call them yourself." Jack passed a silent look of thanks to Eddie. "Or that you kept your little reunion with them a secret. Especially from me."
"Especially from you," she said. "All my choices evaporate once you make a decision."
"You're not a slave. You don't have to do what I tell you."
She slipped a hand into his without a smile. "I'm yours, just the same. And doing what you want is like breathing. It's not strictly necessary, but not doing it feels wholly unnatural." She looked through the window at the runway as a small aircraft slid past on touchdown. "This is something of a reversal. It's always been you, disappearing without saying where you're going or when you'll be back."
"You always knew where I was." He lifted their clasped hands slightly to show his watch with its built-in GPS transponder. As he did, her hand twitched, bending his wrist sharply; but if it hurt, he gave no sign. "This isn't easy for any of us. But it has to be done."
An executive jet rolled into sight a short distance from the terminal and stopped. Its door swung down to become a flight of stairs. No one came out. It stood waiting, its engines whining impatiently. Anna said, "I'm going to miss your birthday."
"We'll celebrate when you get back, over something a good deal more important than adding another candle to a cake."
Bobby leaned close. "Mom, they said they can fix you, and they won't have to make you a Borg to do it. If you don't trust them, say so now."
"They say they love me, and I know they mean it," she said softly. "I just don't fully trust their idea of what love is." She let go of her husband's hand and reached for her stepson; an observer might have thought their embrace inappropriate for a son and mother, but no one would have guessed that relationship lay between them anyway.
She turned to Eddie. "I have you to blame for all of this. Thank you, Eddie. No matter how it turns out, I know it was love that made you do it." She kissed the boy and gave him a hug. "I can't imagine what the house is going to look like when I get back."
"Don't worry," Eddie said seriously. "We'll keep a clear path to the kitchen so you can cook as soon as you get back, once you get all the spilled stuff scraped off the counters and stove."
"I should smack you."
"Yeah. You really should." He touched his lips to her forehead.
Her husband's arms circled her. Their kiss was brief but passionate. His beard stubble rasped over her cheek, bringing a brief smile from her. "They said they may allow visitors later," he said, "if things go well."
"That's not reassuring." She took a deep breath and let it out, looking at the plane. "All of you stay here. The less contact any of you has with them, the safer I feel." She picked up her small bag and marched through the doors to the waiting aircraft, her manner that of a person walking into a hospital with little expectation of walking back out.