Lost Past (22 page)

             
“Care to join us for some work?” Wilson said with more than a hint of sarcasm.

             
His annoyance stung her, and she realized she deserved it. Not because she wasn’t working, but she didn’t make it clear to him that what she was doing was more important. Or was it? Where did her priorities lie, helping the
Vigintees
or trying to escape?
Saving lives or getting on with our lives?
Putting it that way made saving lives important, but they were The Enemy.

             
“I’m free.” Well, I h
ave free time. I’m actually
a prisoner, she thought.
             

             
“Want a trip outside?” Wilson asked both of them.

             
“Not me, I’ll rest, I’m tired,” Cara said.

             
Now that the intensity of the work on the computer wore off, Linda’s feelings for Wilson came to the surface. She wished she could stop looking at him. She loved the way he looked and the way he moved. She even enjoyed watching the change in his appearance as his beard grew and his shaved head filled out with curly black hair. His voice alone thrilled her. Although she was a bit jealous of the time Cara spent with Wilson, Wilson’s vibes were not sexual when they were alone together. They became sexual sometimes when Linda was there, but not always
,
and if he had as much control as John had, he could be thinking about Cara or someone she didn’t even know. Explicit thoughts were rare, and the headaches no longer came with them.

             
“Why do you want to go up?” Linda asked him.

             
“To work on my tan,” he said. Linda looked at his dark brown skin and was about to push for a more realistic answer, but Wilson put his hand near his ear.
             

             
Wilson explained when they were through the decontamination. “I don’t think they’re monitoring this area,” he said. “You know you shouldn’t have revealed you were aware of the cameras.” His voice was gentle, and a bit condescending.

             
She was in the wrong, and there was no point in denying it. “Sorry. I should have thought.” She realized she hadn’t told him enough of what she learned. “It’s not just us. There are cameras everywhere. They’re set up to take advantage of the mirrors in some cases. I haven’t found the microphones, but I’m sure they have them.”

             
“Any sign they’re monitoring the truck farm?” They were slowly wading through pepper plants headed toward some bushes.

             
“No, but I haven’t found everything. I didn’t have time.” She made the last statement with a bit of resentment
, which Wilson ignored
.

             
Wilson walked slowly enough so Linda had no difficulty. He could step over the plants with an easy motion, but they constituted a larger barrier to her. She considered herself an indoor person, but found she missed the sky and the wind. Even temperature, which was just a few degrees warmer than indoors, was a pleasant change.

             
“Why do they monitor their own citizens so closely? You would think we’d have caught some hint of it on all the shows we watched. There must be hundreds of people watching all the monitors.”

             
“They don’t have any,” she said.

             
“Huh?”

             
“The cameras have feeds into what’s labeled the water purifying plant.” She paused and looked around, noting the position of the sun. It was no good, she didn’t even know what time of day it was here, or for that matter, what hemisphere they were in. She didn’t even know if it was
summer
, which the plants suggested. It could be winter and the summers were much hotter. She saw some bushes,
whose presence made it
unlikely
that there were unreasonably hot summers
. It’s spring, she thought. I don’t know the hour
or the location, but it’s summer
. “Are we going toward the water purifying plant?” she asked.

             
“I don’t have a clue. We’re going toward some bushes, which are the only hope anyone would have of concealing something.”

             
“I’m wondering if there is another entrance, something the
Plict
use. Even if it’s not visible, there should be a landing site next to it.”

             
Linda started to reach down to pick up a strawberry, but Wilson said, “I wouldn’t.”

             
“Why not?”

             
“It’s not worth antagonizing them over it.”

             
“They wouldn’t know.”

             
“Are you sure?”

             
She wasn’t. She wanted to reach for an M&M from her purse, but she was saving them and she didn’t want to show her weakness for food to Wilson. There was little temptation to overeat the bland bars that constituted their food supply.

             
They found a likely candidate for a landing site in a section surrounded by thorny bushes Linda suspected
were
either raspberry or blackberry. Behind them were taller bushes, which Linda deduced were blueberry, because that was one of the fruits mentioned on one of the shows she saw earlier. Although there were small paths through the bushes for the SCIMMs, they were too small for someone to crawl through without being torn by the thorns. The SCIMMs had retractable arms that could be pulled back to go under the bushes. Linda might venture through if covered with leather, but not in the thin
Vigintees
clothing. Her blue jeans might be strong enough, but she would need something for her arms. The thorns would tear her winter jacket to pieces, but it might still protect her.

             
Wilson was not looking down to the tunnels the SCIMMs used, he was looking up. “I’m not tall enough.”

             
Linda thought he was tall enough. His driver’s license said he was 6 ft. 2 in.

             
“Come here.” He got on his hands and knees.

             
She was not sure how he managed it, but somehow, she was sitting on his shoulders while he was standing up. She allowed herself to enjoy the necessary physical contact in spite of the fact that she didn’t need telepathy to realize Wilson’s mood was not sexual. He
wanted to know what was behind the bushes, and she was his tool.

             
“I can’t see much, but it looks like a clear space is there. It looks big enough to land one of those ships.” Linda took advantage of her position to look all around. Suddenly, she saw people coming toward her. “We’re looking for more of the SCIMMs,” she said. “The machines we used to deliver handkerchiefs,” she explained.

             
From Wilson, she felt momentary puzzlement, then he looked
around and spotted the people coming toward them.
“They may
have gotten stuck in the bushes,
”
he said.

             
He knelt and helped her off him. “No, they’re too good for that. But they may be doing other tasks here.
Pruning or fertilizing.
We’ll tell them we think handkerchiefs are a higher priority.”

             
They were taken to
Judit
, who was gaunt and weak, but obviously recovering. Cara was already there. “We are lifting the quarantine. There’ve been no new cases for five days. We see that you have been taking advantage of your freedom to invade our privacy and are confining you to quarters without computer access.”
This was a possibility Linda considered.

             
Cara protested, “We needed the computers to help you, and it’s too early to lift quarantine.”

             
“Take them away,”
Judit
said, before Cara finished speaking.

             
Back in their apartment, with the computers gone, Wilson looked at Linda and said, “You don’t look upset.”

             
She put her hand to her ear, to signal unseen listeners, and said in
Vigintees
, “I’m not upset because I’m not surprised.”

             
Wilson and Cara were both staring at her. She didn’t need telepathy to interpret their surprise at her calmness. “You warned me this might happen,” she said to Wilson.

             
“I thought they would limit what we could see
on the computer, not eliminate
our access entirely,” he replied.

             
The power went out.

             
“We can talk now,” Linda whispered. “They’ll be using electr
onic
devices, because probably only a few of them speak English. We have ten minutes before the power returns.”

             
“How did you get the power to go out now? We might still have been outside,” Wilson said.

             
“Someone sent a message saying we’d been taken into custody. These computers have great AI systems, and I used them.” Linda briefly wondered if Cara or Wilson knew AI stood for artificial intelligence.

             
“We still can’t get out, or go anywhere if we did get out,” Cara said.

             
“I’m not trying to get out,” Linda replied, feeling her way to a chair. “Actually, the only thing I need to do is talk to you. There are going to be more power failures, until I give the code to the computers. Even that is a temporary fix. I couldn’t correct it completely, if I wanted to. If something happens to me, I’ve set it up so each of you can give code phrases to control things, at least temporarily, but if they keep all of us prisoner, they’ll have a hard time stopping things without wiping the computers first. I don’t think they’ll do that.”

             
“
What’s our codes
?” Wilson asked.

             
“I’ll tell you each separately.”

             
Cara started singing in a loud voice. Linda was glad Cara figured out how to avoid hearing and help confound any unseen listeners. She
found Wilson by feel and whispered,
“Ver
onica
under the bridge.”

             
“How . . . Jesus, I’ll never keep anything secret from you.”

“Well, you were thinking about her a few days ago.”

Cara stopped singing, and Linda whispered her phrase while Wilson sang.

             
Linda lay down on her cot while Wilson and Cara carried on a conversation in English about some psychological aspect of catching criminals. She amused herself by translating everything into
Vigintees
. L
earning languages didn’
t come easily to her, and she was worried she would lose the
Vigintees
if they removed the translation disk. She took enough Arabic to get through college, working harder for her B’s in Arabic than she did for her A’s in all her math and computer courses.

             
After Mom disappeared, Dad persuaded a colleague,
Takeuti
, to work with her on computers. Dad helped the colleague’s daughter on her thesis. Linda didn’t realize at the time
the help given
was an exchange. It wasn’t until she started graduate school that she realized
she’d been taught by a world-renowned expert
with a surprising amount of patience. One of them, and she wasn’t certain if it was
Takeuti
or her father, arranged for her to have an internship with a company that contracted to
the government to legally hack
computers. She started small, on police cases, but graduated to terrorists’ websites.
             

             
Linda wanted to talk to
Takeuti
about the computers, because they were ternary, rather than binary. Her first thought
was
that it was related to the
Plict
having three fingers on each hand, but she eventually realized the hardware dictated the system. Everything had three states, rather than the two present in Earth computers. She had no idea about the physical device that made this efficient, but the logic was fascinating. She found some old code that used a binary when doing bit manipulation, suggesting that a conversion was made when the hardware changed. If “bit” stood for
bi
nary dig
it
, what would a ternary digit be?
Tet
or tit?

             
The lights came on, and Linda realized she’d lost track of Wilson and Cara’s conversation and hadn’t told them what they needed to know. “You’ve got to record the times and durations of the blackouts. Here,” she said fishing her blue marker out of her purse. “Write on the mirrors.”