LEDMAN PICKUP

by Tom Lichtenberg

Smashwords Edition copyright 2010 by Tom Lichtenberg

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One

"Your package has experienced an exception.” Zoey Bridges stared at the words on her laptop screen, puzzled and confused. Packages don't have experiences, she thought, and in any case, how can an exception be experienced? What does that even mean? It was some moments before she realized what the shipping company was telling her. They had lost her box. It was gone. Missing in action. Misplaced. Disappeared.

"Oh no!" she exclaimed, "It can't be! Not now! Not this!"

"Oh no!" she repeated herself, backing away from the laptop in fear of unleashing her rage on the thing. This was worse than 'oh no'!

She backed up all the way to her living room window, which was open to the street two stories below and caught her backside just enough to keep her from taking the plunge. Frantically, she scanned the room for any small objects that had the potential to be smashed or thrown or stomped on without causing too much damage to anything else. It was times like these that she wished her mother was still alive and still giving her those hideous little glass animals for Christmas. "I could use a little glass animal right now,” she thought. "I'd snap its ears off.”

She took stock of the stuff she did have in her fairly Spartan apartment: a couple of desk lamps on fragile side-tables, some lousy Inspector Mole paperbacks, a notebook and pens, the laptop on her kitchen counter, a large bright green stuffed boa constrictor draped from the coat hanger hook on the door, her four identical pairs of sneakers, the ancient princess telephone. And that, as she often liked to say, was that.

"The books could go out the window,” she considered, but by this time her initial panic had passed and she was capable of breathing again. Cautiously, she approached the laptop. The calamitous email was still there, glowing at her with impunity in the early dusk light. Bla bla bla, bla bla bla, we're sorry to report, bla bla bla, your package has experienced an exception bla bla bla, tracking number, well that's something at least. She clicked on the tracking number and the browser leapt to another page, this one displaying a list of the places where the package had been scanned until its untimely demise. The very last place was not too very far away. Wetford, Arizona. A twelve hour drive or so, Zoey thought. I could get there by morning if I hurried.

It was helpful to be thinking in terms of a plan. This was her typical modus operandi. Planning and control. Taking responsibility. Setting out and getting it done. Fulfillment. Finding the package was a must. No two ways around it. What would Chris say? How could she face him? She couldn't, at all, and that was that. He didn't even need to know, ever, as long as she found it. She was relieved she hadn't yet informed him of its request.

The truth was she had been putting it off all day and had only just now logged back into the computer to take the plunge and send him a note. The device had asked to go home. Literally. She was trying to think of a way to express it better than that, but hadn't come up with the words. She felt guilty, as if she had let the thing down. Maybe it was homesick. Who knew? The whole project had been wearing her down, causing her more anxiety than any other job she could remember, and when you came to look at it, that made no sense at all. There was no rational cause for all the fretting and worrying, unless you attempted to calculate the actual shape and size of the utterly unknown.

Zoey was a freelance black-box tester, and was damn good at her job, or at least she was until now. She had worked for W.W.A. before, and many other important companies as well. She was even famous, in her own obscure way, as an elite device tester, someone with an uncanny talent to find the most intractable software and hardware bugs, with a tremendous ability to reproduce and report them in a ridiculously timely manner. She had saved device makers possibly millions of dollars, and carved out a nice little niche for herself. Most recently she had worked on several top-secret state-of-the-art gizmos and gadgets whose impending future releases were bound to transform the nature of human reality itself. Only a few months earlier she had tested, and put her stamp of approval upon P.M.S., the Personal Muzak System (tm), which would revolutionize the entire on-hold experience by playing only music tailored to the specific personal tastes of the physical customer at the other end of the line.

She had lists of professional relationships. She had a sterling reputation. She kept her socialnet tidy and clean. You could not find a single thing against her online. She was forty-one years old, single and yet not burdened with cats or dogs or even a parakeet. She had no distracting personal interests, at least none which required much time. She was centrally located in Austin, Texas, and absolutely devoted to her craft. Never before had she even lost sight of a device. Never before had she failed to fulfill obligations. This was possibly the end of the world as she knew it.

"Taking deep breaths,” she reminded herself, as she sat back down on the bar stool she loved to swivel around on while working. She swiveled a few times and gathered her thoughts. It's all about control, she chided herself, personal control and alignment. But all she could think of was the package and asked herself several extremely important questions: Did I make sure the device was completely secure inside of the box? It won't get damaged, will it? That would definitely be bad. The package itself, was it sealed up properly? Did I do something wrong with the labeling? It was clearly marked, was it not? Next Day Air, Priority One. As she recalled the steps she had taken in packing it up and shipping it off, she realized that she had not done anything wrong. This could not have been her mistake. It was theirs.

As the evening came on, Zoey didn't even get up to turn on a light. Soon it was just her and the laptop alone in the dark, glaring at each other and giving off heat. She remembered her last conversation with Chris.

“Why does he always make me so nervous?” she wondered. Other people she'd talked to about him reported the exact same responses - anxiety, nervousness, stuttering, and a tremendous desire to please. Certainly he was tall and handsome, had a wonderful, deep confiding voice that drew you in and made you feel special and important. There was something unnatural about his charisma, though, as if he himself were somehow embarrassed about it. People were always giving him things, sending him things, wanting to do things for him. He never asked, never had to. He was one of those people who always seem to get whatever they want while not even lifting a finger. Had she ever said no to the man? No. Did she know anybody who had? Again, no. Could she stammer out a complete sentence when talking to him? Once again, no. He would call up every once in awhile to check on a project, ask if it was going okay. It was, every time, and still she found it difficult to say so.

With most employers she would write up a contract, a tedious document full of complete and precisely detailed requirements, understandings and instructions, which she would follow to the letter and insist that they do also, but with W.W.A. it was always "whatever.” Nothing in writing. Nothing at all. You want it, you got it. Most of the time that was fine. They would deliver the product with enough information to get her going, but this time it was totally different. They had given her almost nothing to go on. The thing came in the package - the same one it left in - with a single piece of paper enclosed, on which was written, in pencil, these words: "please put the device somewhere in your clothes, take it wherever you go, and check periodically for further instructions."

That was it.

A normal project would be something like a cell phone. She would make calls on it, to make sure that she could. She would download data, send text messages, whatever the functionality of the gadget. She would try to do everything the device could possibly do. This device seemed to do nothing. It was shaped like a cell phone - small and black, rectangular with a screen - but it had no removable casing, no apparent battery, no input or output jacks, no buttons, no keyboard, nothing at all you could push or click or switch or press or pull or do anything with. It was a lump of plastic weighing approximately twelve ounces.

For ten days she carried it around. She'd put it in the pocket of her jeans. She'd put it in her shirt, in her jacket. She'd placed it inside of a woolen cap and wore it on her head. She'd considered stuffing it into her bra. She'd put it into each of her sneakers. She'd worn it in a headband. She'd carried it with her all day, every day, and taken it to bed in her pajamas at night. The device made no sounds and gave off no light. This utterly useless gadget did nothing at all, or so it seemed.

No wonder she was fidgety. The thing had gotten on her nerves. "What is it?” she couldn't help but wonder. What do they want from me? What am I supposed to be doing? She assumed it was a challenge, a puzzle, a test. You don't just give an inert piece of plastic to one of the world's finest and most expensive quality engineers and expect them to not try and figure it out. It made her wonder even more than before about that company, W.W.A.. There were rumors about those people, their inscrutability and the fact that no one seemed to really know anything about them. Some people said they were a secret branch of the government, but Zoey had done enough government work to tell the difference between genius and that. Others said there was a billionaire behind the scenes who was working on some fantastic quest, to discover the fountain of youth perhaps, or some other well-worn fable. Still others believed there was simply a mad scientist at work behind the pleasant facade that was Chris. Zoey herself suspected that Chris was some sort of Jekyll and Hyde, but tended to think, deep inside, that what was really going on was some sort of combination of all of those notions - a team of scientists employed by a billionaire in cahoots with some government somewhere, possibly backed by big oil money.

She had worked on some of their projects besides P.M.S.. There was the transitory laser tracking device that had once made a local splash in the news, when a toddler was found by somebody using it. The incident had caused a minor uproar of privacy concerns, which blew over quickly as most of those do. There was a device that purported to enhance one's romantic desirability, for a limited time only, but the after effects were unpleasant enough to raise questions of "beer goggle lawsuits.” There was the virtual taste bud tester, which Zoey had found quite remarkable, learning and gauging her own tastes in food to such an extent that she used it to scan restaurants before entering. Trickiest of all was their "caller undo,” which claimed to be able to erase unpleasant telephone conversations from everyone's memory. Zoey could never quite remember if that one had worked as expected. But a device that did nothing, well, that was a piece of work she had never expected to encounter.

It must have been doing something, though, for after a week and a half of her toting it about in every conceivable wearable location, the screen suddenly flashed on one morning and blinked with the phrase, "I would like to go home now, please,” in a pleasant Calibri size forty four font.

Zoey was touched by the "please.” She carefully packaged the thing in its original container, labeled it for the attention of Chris at W.W.A. headquarters in San Francisco. She took it to her customary mail services location - Gone Postal - and saw the thing off, with a bit of relief. Two days had gone by and still she had not contacted Chris. She was still trying to think of what she would say, and now this, the package gone missing. She was out of ideas. Her mind felt as blank as the device's screen had once been. I'm going to have to do something, she thought, but that was as far as she got.

"Okay, calmly now,” she told herself, "Calm is the word, because I do not panic, at least not much beyond the initial shock. I'm a professional, after all,” she concluded. She had become that way through a special training of discipline and rigor, years of practice and routine. One step at a time, one foot in front of the other. Plan first, then plan again. Be precise, be methodical, be thorough. Control.

"I am now officially calm,” she decided, though remaining motionless in the darkened apartment. "I will now turn on the lights,” she claimed, and as she thought it she did it. She stood up, took two steps to the wall, reached out and clicked the switch. The kitchen light came on. She retreated back to her bar stool and swiveled some more. One thing at a time.

"I will make a plan,” Zoey noted, and turned her attention to the computer. She opened a plain text document and began to tap out an outline. First things first is the way.

First. What the heck am I going to tell Chris?

No. First. Should I even get in touch with him?

No.

Ok, then.

First - complete the documentation on the testing, such as it was. Complete the list of the articles of clothing within which the device was contained. Complete the calculations of the mileage obtained transporting the device here and there. Complete the daily diary of the device's activities.

She noted all of the above in the text document, and then proceeded to check off each item, because they were already done. She had finished this part the same day she'd sent back the device. She filled in the details from the tracking records provided by the shipping company. The device had been logged in San Antonio, Sonora, Balmorhea and Las Cruces, before its final entry in Wetford, Arizona.

'Who am I fooling?' she nearly said out loud. "This is a terrible report!"

"I could do a word count,” she reflected, and discovered that her official document now comprised nearly one thousand words. Not bad. Considering it had nothing of interest within it!

I don't even know what the device is, or what it was supposed to be. I didn't do anything with it, not anything I could describe. I just did what they told me to do. I carried it around. It wanted to go home. I tried to send it home. It got lost. And that is that.

'Why can't I just call up Chris and tell him the truth?"

Because the truth was not good enough. Zoey knew from experience that devices like this were probably precious and rare - it was quite possibly the only one of its kind, potentially priceless. Unless it was a joke. Would they do that to me? Is someone out to get me?

"I do have enemies,” she told herself, mostly other testing houses who were jealous of her reputation, but Chris would never, no, it was out of the question, impossible. The device, she considered for the ten thousandth time that week, must be of tremendous importance. It has to be, or else they would never have given it to me.

"I should call up that place,” she decided. "The last known docket.” She checked the browser again. The place the package was scanned was a warehouse called Ledman Storage and Pickup. It had a phone number listed. Zoey picked up the phone and called.

They were closed.

Of course.

Already it was past eight o'clock on a Thursday.

"Oh no, not Thursday!” she shouted. "What else could go wrong? If I don't get there by tomorrow, they will probably be closed until Monday!"

Calm. You are calm. You will now be calm.

Ok.

Much better.

I am calm.

I can research that place.

She searched them online and found a few items of interest. Ledman Storage had a single location. They were only in Wetford, nowhere else. They were small, or at least had the lousiest website. It displayed a few links to other warehouses and some shipping lines, but all of those links were defunct. It seemed to be a sort of transitional spot, a place where nothing was intended to stay, but merely pass through on its way somewhere else. It was not clear at all why the package had even gone there in the first place. It should have gone by plane. She had paid enough, certainly. Next Day Air, she recalled. So why was it going overland, and why had it taken two days to go a measly six hundred miles? Something was not making sense. Someone had made a gigantic mistake.

"I wish I knew more about shipping,” she thought, but already she knew, in the back of her mind, there was only one thing she could do. She would have to go on the road. She couldn't risk waiting all night for some scruffy young deadbeat to finally show up in some seedy old warehouse in the middle of a tumbledown desert just to tell her "shucks I dunno ma'am, it sho' ain't around heah no mo',” if he even would answer the phone. She had a picture in her mind of the man and it wasn't a nice one.

The package was her responsibility. That much was clear. If you want something done right, you do it yourself. Take control. She was already in the bedroom packing her bags when the phone started ringing.

"Don't answer,” she said to herself as she picked up and said,

"Hello? Zoey Bridges."

"Hey Zoey, it's Chris,” said the voice at the other end of the line.

"Oh hi,” Zoey melted. She sat down on the bed.

"Just thought I'd check in,” he continued. There was a long pause.

"Everything going okay?” he finally asked.

"Oh yeah,” she replied, "just fine. Nothing new. Nothing, really"

"Oh, okay,” he said. "Do you mind if I ask you some questions?"

"No, no, go ahead,” Zoey told him, and thought to herself, "I can do this. I can handle it. I am calm.”

"About the device,” Chris went on. "I know we didn't give you much to go on. Sorry about that. Really, I am, but it's all for the best, as you'll see."

"Oh?" She couldn't conceive of any more syllables.

"Yeah,” he said, "it's actually quite an intriguing experiment. We're hoping to learn a great deal. Has it said anything yet?"

"Said?" she muttered. "No, no. I haven't heard a peep."

"It ought to be telling you something at some point,” her employer informed her. "I can't tell you what or even how that will happen, but you can definitely expect some feedback,” he said. "Until then, I suppose, it isn't very interesting, is it?"

"Oh, no, not at all,” Zoey said, "I mean, not in that way, or in a usual way, or, oh, I don't know what I'm saying. It doesn't do anything that you can see that it's doing."

"Oh, it's doing something,” Chris told her. "All of the time, I can tell you that much. It's a busy little bee, but it's all self-contained, as you know. It will tell you, when it's time, so don't worry. I just thought that it might have, you know, already done so by now."

"No, no,” Zoey said, "nothing yet. I'll tell you, of course, as soon as it does, as soon as I have anything to tell you, that is."

"Of course,” Chris replied. "Nothing but the best for this box. That's why we sent it to you of all people. There isn't another, I can tell you that much. It's the only one of its kind."

"That's just great,” Zoey sighed. "I guess I kind of guessed that already."

"Well,” said Chris after a pause. "I'll wish you good night, then."

"Good night,” she said quickly, and hung up the phone.

"I am calm,” she reminded herself. "Very calm. I know what I'm doing, exactly. I am packing my clothes and then I am getting into my car. And then I am driving all night. And then I am finding that package. And when I find it, I am going to take it, in person, all the way to San Francisco. Yes I am. And I am doing it calmly every step of the way."

Then, as calm as a winter tornado, she threw all her clothes in a bag and ran out the door.

Two

The first thing it knew was a bump on its side. A corner that had previously been fine, sharp and square was now dented and blunt. The landing was soft. There had been no pain. A bump and a view from all sides except down. Around it was carpet, thin and pale green. Off in the distance were some black plastic brackets containing some forms and some packages, flattened. They seemed to be all the same. Up above, way high up, was the light, white and solid across. A darkish tan thing coming down, and the next thing it knew it was flying. That's when it first felt the vibrations. A feeling of motion and air flowing past. It was moving against its volition and that was an action that didn't seem right. Placed back on a surface of what was once yellow. Vibrations again in the lower range buzzing. Words that came through.

"It says Air on the label."

Other words came from another form elsewhere, a bit higher frequency and tighter, more pointy.

"It's in the computer as Ground."

"Maybe we ought to check?"

"Computer says Ground."

Slid across now by the form with the graspers, it felt itself tearing and torn, pulled apart, but that was all on the surface, it seemed. Soon a smoothing and restoration of sorts.

"Ground it shall be,” said the original vibration, and then a more radical flight as it soared through the air and landed on top of a heap of some others. Here in the bin it could still see the ceiling of light, but nothing around it but boxes and white. It settled in for a long quiet time, adjusting to all the sensations. Frequencies ranging from very high up down to rumblings that felt underground, deep below. All of these had to be messages. Some it could process in some shape or form. There was meaning at times. There were things going out and things coming in. More noises became more familiar. The sound of the first and the sound of the second that were voices. Occasionally others quite similar. Humming come down from the ceiling of light. Shiftings and sortings as things piled on top. None of this was quite what it wanted. It had yearnings but could not express them.

Later darkness after more motion. New surroundings, new senses, new visions. Rolling. Being rolled. Handled by different graspers. Flying, then resting, more piling. Time was a blur of starting and stopping, moving and yet not in motion. Energy streaming and always a host of vibrations. Occasional beepings from deep down inside. Pulses of wavelengths of light.

It seemed like a rhythm that would go on forever, alternate resting and motion, darkness and light. It felt like it was getting to know all these facts. More and more it seemed like the others around it were things like itself, in a process of destiny, or at least of awakening. It could feel stirrings around it and occasionally another item would bump up against it and make contact. There was jostling for position at times as well, and it had a sense that it would find its own spot if it could. At the same time it seemed that anywhere was good enough, one shelf as welcoming as another.

Voices were intermittent, sometimes muffled and distant, sometimes close and distinct. Words that had come to be familiar. It was part of an infinite relay, handed off from one runner to the next. In this way the time passed and the flow was underway, until abruptly it came to an end.

Three

Leonora Wells had a motto she lived by each day: get high early and get high often. This morning was no different, beginning with a wake-up scramble for a joint, which she pulled into her lungs on the fire escape that doubled as her front porch. Three floors above the alley she enjoyed the crack of light that sometimes appeared in the daytime above the apartment buildings that ranged about on every side. Behind her in the single room she inhabited was a pile of sheets, blankets, and a variety of tin foil wrappings left over from last week's burritos. The hot plate remained unplugged on the floor as she had not felt much like cooking in recent days. She was already wearing her outfit for the day - overalls, t-shirt and boots - so all it would take to get going was something to eat and a smoke. She stumbled back into the room and a quick glance told her she had nothing of those.

Damn it, she thought, but she'd already known. Every day was like this. Still, it wasn't so bad. She had a half a bag stashed in the jar, nothing to do but the job, and the job was so easy it suited her fine. Half a block down the street was the warehouse: Ledman Storage and Pickup. Leonora Wells had been working there for a month and could hardly believe in her luck. All she had to do was wave some drivers around and sign in when they came and when they left. The rest was pretty much up to them and the guys. The guys were Junior and Rolando, fun-loving fellows who never had a bad word to say or a mean look on their faces. All they did was move things around. She was supposed to be telling them where, but they knew better than she did. After all, she was the new kid in town. Rolando and Junior had been there for what seemed forever. The previous "supervisor,” an asshole named Rick, was not missed at all. He'd been a micro-manager supreme, always on their case, scolding them about the proper placement of packages for maximum efficiency. What did they care about that?

Ledman Storage was just a way station. Boxes come in, and boxes go out. Who cares where they are in the meantime? As long as they made their way out into the world, that's all that really mattered in the end. Imagine that Rick guy having a fit every time that Rolando put package A on shelf C! But that's how it went. It hardly helped matters that package A turned out to be some critical shipment on its way to a nuclear research facility, and shelf C was reserved for East Coast medical equipment. Cost poor old Rick his position though it was scarcely his fault. Now Rick was supervising garden hose salesmen at K-Po's. Rolando and Junior didn't care. Nobody ever blamed them at all.

Leonora thought that she had it made. The pay was damn good, the job was a cinch, she could do it with both eyes tied behind her back, a thought which made her burst out in a flurry of giggles. She stumbled her way into work and was happy to see that the guys were also in form. A delivery had come in from Texas, a light one, half a dozen small boxes mostly intended for pickup a half hour later. Anyone could see they should stay on the table right by the front landing, but something about their sizes and shapes made them an irresistible target for Junior.

"Go long,” he shouted, and heaved the first package along down the aisle, expecting Rolando to go for it. Rolando, however, stood still and the thing hit and went sliding beneath a rack of gray shelving along the west wall.

"Aw, man,” Junior complained but Rolando just shrugged. Junior picked up the next one and this time they put together a decent string of tosses and catches, all the way to nine in a row before Junior went and dropped the darn thing and it busted. All sorts of stuffing and peanuts spilled out of the side of the box and the guys figured they'd better patch it up right away, and that was the end of that game. Leonora didn't even have to scold them. They knew their business and she didn't care. As long as there's no trouble she was fine, and so far whenever the boss had called to complain she'd just listened and hadn't really bothered to hear. It was pretty much all the same to her if they were going to fire her any day now or not. She had found a few beers sitting behind a blue dumpster and distributed them freely for breakfast.

Four

Kandhi Clarke had been paying close attention. As Chief Officer for the WWA Testing Division, Zoey Bridges was of special interest to her. Kandhi had been the first to discover Zoey and her talents. It had happened quite by accident. Kandhi and her mother were having coffee at one of their favorite spots and happened to overhear a conversation at the next table, a discussion between Zoey and another unidentified female on the subject of black box testing. Zoey had put together quite a theory and was making a case for intuition over planning although, it must be said to her credit, she did not deny the importance of the latter, only that the former tended to uncover the most pernicious defects. Planning undoubtedly led to bases being covered, i's being dotted and t's being crossed, but intuition delved below the surface and hit the rare gold more often than not.

Her companion argued a cost-benefit analysis, that the rare breed of intuitive tester could not be relied upon in the aggregate, and that therefore it was wiser to develop a comprehensive course of action. Zoey did not disagree, but asserted that in her case, you could have both. Kandhi ventured to interrupt and joined them at their table. She discovered nothing interesting in the other woman, who struck her as a bland, vanilla type engineer, but Zoey, there was promise there. Kandhi had been one of the original members of WWA, the third employee to be precise, after the two founders, one of whom was the legendary Chris.

She was not the greenhorn she had once been when the company had first got off the ground. She was older, of course, and more mature, though she still sported her spiky pink hair and a random assortment of piercings. The new Kandhi was a serious person who handled her responsibilities responsibly. She had been the original tester of some of their first devices and had developed some ideas of her own when it came to quality assurance. She was certain that Zoey was on to something, but from her own experience knew that such talents were untrainable. One had to be born with it, gifted. Kandhi had come across only one or two others in that line of work until then. She gathered Zoey's contact information and promised to get in touch.

First, however, she did a little research of her own. In a matter of days she had a complete dossier and personality profile compiled on the subject of Zoey Bridges, only child, mathematics major in college. Zoey had stumbled into software testing after a temp job at Micro Microware turned into something more. At M and M (as they styled themselves), Zoey had been charged with validating the initial findings of the development team, that the intelliprobe they had released into its chamber had indeed acquired the volcanic-bacteria-sensing tissue they'd intended it to. In order to accomplish this task, Zoey had to depend upon a sophisticated measuring device, and the more she used that machine, the more suspicious she became about its reliability. She conducted offline experiments which were not authorized by the division, and the company was not amused. She reported numerous deficiencies in the tool and concluded that M and M had wasted their money and that the entire project could not be validated by any means whatsoever.

She was fired from that job, but the makers of the device, Ensuwalla Mektron, hired her as a special consultant while they went back to the drawing board. She enjoyed the whole special consultant thing and soon branched out, offering her services to makers of other scientific devices. One success followed another, and soon her career had led into the world of personal electronic communications and other consumer enterprises. She had established a reputation, not only as a skilled and talented consultant, but also as an almost unbelievably bland and boring person. Kandhi had never before encountered anyone as dull.

Zoey was indeed on the socialnet (this was almost required for people of her generation), but her personal revelations were embarrassingly tedious, unrelieved by even a cute kitten video or quilting pattern. Her most original contributions to the worldly online super-culture was a periodic listing of cracks in neighboring sidewalks, a paean to the virtues of wax beans (they were yellow, and beanie), and a brief discussion on the brevity of precise midnight. Kandhi eventually contracted with Zoey to test a well-known and thoroughly tested WWA device, only to discover that Zoey was indeed everything she bragged of being. She uncovered seven priority-one defects in the device in the first two days she possessed it.

Since then, Kandhi had not hesitated to hire Zoey for even alpha level testing. It was expensive to go that route, but had proven worth it. She had brought Chris into the picture, hoping to provoke a better sense of Zoey's character, which up until then presented itself as what-you-see-is-what-you-get: thoroughly bland yet continually astounding. Kandhi could not fathom how such an uninteresting person could yield such important results. After several contracts, Kandhi was more than satisfied with Zoey's work, but she still didn't completely trust her. She'd hoped that Chris would help to crack the icy exterior, but so far he hadn't produced the desired effect. Zoey was still an enigma. She had fallen under Chris' spell, of course, but all that brought about was a great deal of stammering and awkward telephone recordings. Kandhi wanted more. She wanted to crack her wide open, find out what was really going on inside, but now it seemed she was even lying to Chris. There had to be an explanation.

She had picked Zoey especially for this assignment. Now or never, Zoey girl, she thought to herself as she shipped the curious device, and from that day on had been monitoring her every move. Zoey didn't know just how closely she was being observed. Kandhi noted with satisfaction how Zoey had gone through her paces, had attempted to pick and pry at the thing, had followed instructions and yet worked around them. Zoey had done everything possible, everything that ought to be done, and when the device had completed its work, it reported to her that Zoey had fulfilled her commitment. She had packed the thing up and taken it down to Gone Postal, and that was the end of the line.

Kandhi was eager to see its report, but the device didn’t arrive as expected. Something had gone wrong along the way. She checked with the shipper and discovered, with more than dismay, that the package was lost. It had "experienced an exception.” Quickly she scanned the tracking tables and saw the same listings that Zoey had previously noted: San Antonio, Sonora, Balmorhea and Las Cruces, and finally, Ledman Storage and Pickup, in Wetford, Arizona. Kandhi rapidly checked with the airlines. There was a flight to L.A., then to Phoenix, from where it was only a two hour drive to that warehouse destination. She could get there by mid-morning, if she moved fast enough. There was no time to lose, because this was no ordinary package.

Five

Zoey drove a super mini compact car of the grayest gray and the drabbest interior. She could think of no good reason to waste money on vehicle decor. The car was a means to an end, and that was that. Even now in the dark she lamented the need to use it. Zoey had a fear of transportation that could be plotted on a graph, beginning with the necessity of walking, which was at least tolerable, if tiring. Slightly above that was walking fast, something she felt should never be required. If you were walking fast, then you had miscalculated somewhere along the line, otherwise, you would be on time, and walking at a normal pace.

Manual wheeled transit, a category that included bicycles and skating, was absurd but justifiable. Motorized wheel transit was already on the borderline, but if it had to be done, buses were preferable to cars except that they never seemed to go where you needed to go, when you needed to go there. Cars would have to do in a pinch. Trains were pushing it. They were, how would she put it? Alarming. Everything else beyond the rails was simply out of the question. She would never, ever fly. The very idea was appalling. She didn't even appreciate it for birds, which were nothing but airborne nuisances. Ever since that sneak attack when she was a little child.

She had thought of everything: clothes, snacks, laptop, phone. The car was waiting below in the garage. Lights were on in there and no one else was, thankfully. Her apartment complex was small but fully inhabited. Fortunately, it was civilized to the extent that people still respected the assignment of spaces. Only once in the seven years she'd occupied the place had her spot been stolen by some unlawful neighbor. She had left a caustic note. The incident was not repeated.

Her beeper beeped the door open, and beeped again later to lift up the gate. It was already nine o'clock at night. She proceeded cautiously over the perilously cracked sidewalk in front of the garage. How many times she would have to complain to the management was still an open question, its answer currently resting at seventeen. Further along, Zoey had to wait at several traffic lights before finally getting out of town. She could never understand that. Whoever timed the lights had to know there was nobody out there now, so why should she have to sit and wait exactly twenty-seven seconds for nothing! If she had another life to live she would consider becoming a traffic engineer instead. She was certain she would excel at such a career.

It was going to be a long night. Zoey did not believe in coffee, only in the power of the will. The highways would be easy going all night long, nothing but truckers and late night drunks. The radio might have helped to pass the time, but Zoey considered it superfluous. She had her thoughts to keep her company. Currently she was working on an exercise, a mental game to keep her wits intact. She would memorize a day, a whole day, every instant. She'd been working on that day for quite a while by now. It was not an actual day, but an ideal one, not perfect but essential. It would contain all elements in their proper durations. It wasn't glamorous or literary or especially remarkable. There would be some achievements, but relatively minor ones. There would be several setbacks, but nothing very drastic. Red lights would be among them. A beverage not quite right.

She had planned to take a year to develop that single day, and so far she had filled many hours. She relived them in her mind, went back over the minutes and their occupying items. She had become attached to the day, which she thought of as The Day. No one else knew anything about it. She had ruled out writing anything down, even reminder notes. It had to be all in her head or nothing. There were phone calls with friends that never happened. Only she knew what they had talked about. There were things she had seen that no one ever saw. There was a project she'd been working on, but only during The Day. She had discovered defects in the code, imaginary bugs that would never be fixed. At times it felt so real she had nearly sent out emails, only to recall the fictitious nature of the task before her fingers reached the keyboard. She had smiled at those moments. Soon those smiles and those moments had also become a part of The Day.

She managed to keep her mind on The Day and her eyes on the road throughout the long and lonely ride through San Antonio proper and out to the West through Texas into New Mexico. The hours passed by with the stripes on the road. She maintained an even fifty in the slow lane all the way. No need to overdo it. Twelve hours or so would be enough. Besides, if she arrived too early, the warehouse would not be open anyway, and the last thing she needed was to be hanging around with nothing to do in some sketchy unfamiliar district. Everything was proceeding according to plan, and that was all you could ask for.

Six

If it had to sum up its overall sensation in one word, the word would be 'wrong'. It was developing a sense of propriety, of the way things ought to be, as opposed to the way things were. Wrong to be on the floor, for one thing. Doubly wrong to be wedged beneath a giant rack of rusty shelves. Triply wrong to be enshrouded in cobwebs and surrounded by dust motes flying everywhere. It sensed rustling and scurrying from behind, and muffled booms above. There was creaking and shifting and sudden cool breezes stirring up the particles of dirt that rained upon it. It had known a more orderly arrangement and could definitely appreciate it more and more. To be on top of tables. To be in stacks with other boxes, square to the wall, nicely aligned for sliding onto hand trucks, down ramps and into shiny clean silvery ledges on wheels. That was the way things ought to be. Instead it had spent the morning in the gloom, ever since it had felt that lifting and tossing and sliding and banging against the floor and the wall and coming to rest.

Voices came and went, sometimes clearer, sometimes hazy. Important items overheard or so it considered. It registered each sound and placed the voices in their categories. The tosser. The runner. The laugher. The tosser made the most noises, or at least it made the noises on the wavelength that got through the best. The tosser threw words that repeated, that became clearer, that had definitive declarations. It sorted and arranged the words and lined up several ideas. The ideas, for example, that Miami was better than Indy, and that Green Bay was better than San Francisco. These had connotations that rang bells. San Francisco was something familiar. It was on the label. Green Bay was apparently something like San Francisco, only "better.” It was worth considering.

Other phrases and random words made less impact, such as "your mom likes my home cooking" and "you can suck on this.” It diligently filed all these away, sorting and arranging in a sort of ad hoc schema. Each new sequence was keyed by the loudest of the bunch. "Eightball" was associated with both "lucky" and "behind.” It keenly waited for new inputs, while continually examining those already captured and cycled through them, considering and committing.

There were trumpets as well, bringing new smells on wheels at one point. The laugher passed by the most often. That one seemed to roam throughout the dark and airy warehouse filled from floor to ceiling with shelving, most of it vacant, much of it littered with foul-smelling pellets that seemed to follow the scurrying sounds. On occasion there would be an engine resonating from that opening of light at the far other end of the place, and then some lifting and shifting and sliding could be determined, and the roaring roared away after a time had passed. On those occasions, the warehouse generally became emptier. The day went by. It was not a day to remember, particularly. It was a day for reflecting and judging and coming to decisions. It was a day that had caused an awakening.

Seven

Most of the day Leonora had nothing to do. Junior and Rolando were like their own little twin nation, communicating with each other in a series of complicated gestures and sounds that would take a ‘warehouse whisperer’ to decipher. They didn't know much about her. She was just the latest 'new guy' in a series of new guys that never lasted very long and never made much of a difference to them. They continued to go about their business in a haphazard and careless manner, knowing that the new guy would always take the hit for whatever mistakes they might make. The boss, after all, was their cousin, Matthew Pilates, and he knew everything there was to know about them. On the very first day he had instructed Leonora to "ride their ass" or else hers would be "grass.” Leonora had laughed at that, and had pretty much been laughing ever since.

Ledman Storage and Pickup was vast and cold and drafty. Even on the hottest summer day it was a bog in there, a rundown building with its own microclimate. It didn't matter that the windows were all broken out - the heat never seemed to want to come in. The roof was corrugated tin of the variety that usual bakes whatever it covers, but this roof reflected it all into space, probably boiling some moon in a galaxy light years away. The floor, made of chipped and rotting concrete, was perpetually damp and the shelves of rusting metal were creaky but never gave way. Most of the building was empty, and Leonora wandered about to fill up her time, poking and peering into storage containers storing nothing, empty wicker baskets that might have held foliage of some sort at some time. She guessed that there had once been a pottery business in part of the building, from the shards of colored ceramic she found here and there.

She really liked to be there. She didn't have to go sneaking a joint. She could light up any old place. The fridge had a kegerator inside that Pilates always made sure was kept full. He paid his two cousins practically nothing, and it was true that they pretty much did whatever needed doing. Boxes came in, boxes went out. If there was any lag, they moved them around, but usually the drivers did most of the work. Rolando and Junior kept to their ways and hardly anything out of the ordinary ever occurred. Leonora would have been bored, but she played little games to keep up her interest. She'd chuck rocks at the bits of glass that remained in the corners of windows. "Never let a day go by without breaking something" was another one of her personal mottoes. She threw paint at the walls to see how it splattered. She played peanut golf with a board and the Styrofoam packing material, flailing away at the things as they floated throughout the big empty spaces. She played dust-bowl with the push-broom and tried to make heaps in the corners. Throughout these activities she laughed like a nut job, with an occasional loud snorting that the cousins had come to despise. They called her ‘the donkey’ but she didn't notice that whenever they said the word 'burrito' they were secretly laughing at her.

'Whatever' was the sum of her attitude. She'd had other jobs, plenty in fact, and this one was simply too easy. She wasn't going to let anyone spoil it, and besides, she genuinely liked them sometimes. She liked the way that they talked, the way they goofed off and didn't really care about anything. She had never seen them fret about anything, or even show any interest at all. Whenever she'd ask them a question, they'd just shrug. When she showed them the package, however, Rolando's response was quite different from normal.

"Where'd you get that?" he wanted to know. It was practically the most words he had ever directed her way.

"Just found it,” she told him. "It was under those shelves in aisle seven. It looks pretty new."

"I don't like it,” Rolando replied, and he turned away and walked off. Junior looked closer.

"I think that's the football,” he said and he nodded. "Yeah, I just threw it this morning. I was wondering where it got to. I told Rolie go long but he didn't."

"I guess we ought to put it somewhere,” Leonora suggested, hoping that Junior would tell her where it should go.

"Look it up,” he suggested, pointing at the bar code on the label. "I know we scanned it."

They checked the computer and sure enough it had come in that morning at eight, but that was the weird part about it. It was never supposed to even be there. The thing was definitely registered as Next Day Air from Austin to Frisco. Nobody was scheduled to pick it up. The thing was clearly out of its way.

"What are we supposed to do with it?" Lenora asked, and Junior responded with his usual shrug.

"If it was me I'd just throw it away,” he told her and laughed. "But maybe I'd open it first, and if it was something good then I'd take it,” and he laughed again, harder. This brought Rolando back in a hurry, because he never wanted to miss out on a joke, but as he drew closer he frowned once again.

"That thing is buzzing,” he declared, and sure enough, as soon as he mentioned it, Leonora and Junior noticed it. The sound was low but audible, and the package even seemed to be vibrating a bit.

"It's no good,” Roland repeated. "You ought to smash it. I'll get the hammer,” and he wandered away one more time. Leonora looked puzzled and Junior caught her expression.

"He's got a sixth sense,” Junior told her, "He's got the ESP, like the Extra Normally Perceptive. One time he felt there was a voodoo doll going through so we burned it. It made a weird smell like rubber when it burned. Turned out it was Amazon Barbie. Some little dyke wasn't too happy with us," he burst out laughing again.

"We're not supposed to be opening them,” Leonora said thoughtfully.

"Or burning them,” Junior added, nearly doubling over with laughter this time. He had to find a bench and sit down before he keeled over.

"I could get the next driver to take it,” she said.

"Take it where?" Junior asked. "Drivers don't just take it. You gonna pay for the shipment? 'Cause this thing hasn't been paid for. Not now. I mean it was, but that was for air. Nothing for Wetford to Cali."

"I ain't paying nothing,” she told him with a little anger in her voice. The thought she should part with some money for nothing was too much to deal with.

"Fuck it,” she said, but she noticed Rolando returning with tools and something about the little box changed her mind and she snatched it away before he could harm it.

"The poor little thing has got itself lost,” she murmured as she handled it gently. She got up and set off for a corner of the warehouse where she could be alone with her decision, and finish up the rest of her smoke without Junior or Rolando cadging a hit. She sat on the floor behind a desk overflowing with crumpled up paper, and cradled the box in her lap.

"I probably shouldn't do this,” she told it, but she had already made up her mind. Tearing at the tape with her fingernails, she opened it up, and carefully unwrapped the tightly wound bubble wrap protecting the item inside. Soon she had the little black box in her hand, with its modest little sentence still glowing upon the LED screen.

"I'd like to go home now, please.”

Eight

It was pretty clear right off that her plans were not going to go smoothly. First there was the annoying cab ride to the airport with the driver who would not shut up about her new hairpiece, the IntelliWig ("Hair for Life!"). Apparently this new kind of self-styling toupee adjusted to both mood and meteorological conditions. The driver kept complaining that she didn't feel frizzy even if her hair thought she did. Then there was the problem of the carry-on, which was just a tad too tight for the recently shrunken overhead compartments. She'd been carrying on the same carry-on for years. Suddenly it was too large? The seats had also undergone the same downsizing. She was squeezed in between two old ladies who were apparently competing for the most-overly-perfumed-biddy-of-the-year award. Kandhi held her breath and reminded herself it was only an hour or so on the first leg of the trip, and the second leg was bound to be better. She hadn't counted on the ninety minute tarmac stop. The San Francisco fog had decided to shroud the airport in its thickness and refused to let up until nearly two in the morning. During that endless interval, Kandhi was trapped with nothing but her universal personal device.

The UPD, as they liked to call it, was a special edition of several W.W.A. prototypes coalesced into one. Like the gadget she'd given to Zoey, it was self-powered, no battery or external power source needed. It was solid state, and its rubberized external packaging guaranteed it could not be harmed from anything less than a thousand foot drop. It had no keyboard but recognized anything that Kandhi might swipe on it or say aloud to it. It was capable of conveying its output directly into her mind, thus saving on expensive screens and diodes. For short, she called it "U", and when she talked to it, she liked to begin by saying "hey, you".

She used it for everything: all communications, news, reading, conversations, games, all anything. While stuck on the runway she flicked through her virtual list of contacts professional and otherwise, checking up on their current status and latest doings. Tom was still locked in the basement at HQ. He'd been down there seven days now, likely cooking up something too good to be true. Chris was being offered an America's Cup boat ride by some world champion in New Zealand. Cary Willis was frying catfish in lemon butter. Nancy Petrie was wishing Sylvia Peters a happy birthday. Jenna Maloney was getting divorced again. It was complicated. Zoey Bridges was nothing. Nothing from Zoey Bridges in ages, it seemed. That was okay. She was not supposed to be posting anything about her confidential work and she had no personal life, besides which she was no doubt fast asleep like most sane people in that time zone were. Kandhi’s flight was excruciating. They had made her turn off the device at take-off, and after that she tried and failed to catch a little sleep. The old ladies had brought out their knitting, and the click-click-click of the needles nearly drove her insane. She spent a good half hour walking up and down the aisles, wondering why the flight was full, wondering who the hell the rest of these people were, and why it was so damn important for them to fly to L.A. in the middle of the night on a Thursday. Then she remembered how cheap it was. Cheaper than a damn bus, even, which explained it. Fortunately, once it got underway, the plane trip didn't last long.

Of course she missed the connecting flight to Phoenix, thanks to the fog delay. She had to wait until five to get the next plane. She ordered a triple shot of espresso in her double mocha shake. The UPD was in quiescence. Normally during the day it would go about suggesting things to her. Since it knew her pretty well, it would scan the skyverse for items it knew she’d be interested in. It must have decided to take a rest, seeing as she was usually non-sentient at this Greenwich hour minus eight. She felt a little rejected. It was embarrassing to realize that. In all her dealings with the new technologies, and especially the invasive sort that W.W.A. seemed to revel in, she had kept her emotional distance, had not become attached, had refused to let herself get sucked into the virtual world. But now, she laughed at herself, she was thinking, hey, if you can't count on your universal personal device to keep you company, who can you trust? Then, while sitting around at the gate, staring at the limitless gray carpet, the gadget popped a message into her head. It was from Zoey Bridge's socialnet. It said simply, "today is the day.” That was certainly puzzling. She was tempted to contact Zoey, inquiring further, but couldn't think of exactly what to say without seeming inappropriately nosy, or giving away her own game. She didn't want Zoey to know she was investigating in person. It still nagged at the back of her mind - what was the tester trying to hide? Why hadn't she simply told Chris the truth about what had happened with the device

The five o'clock flight to Phoenix was uneventful, at least, and thankfully non-oderous as well. Kandhi was beginning to count her blessings when she discovered on arrival that her carry-on, which she'd not been allowed to carry on the initial flight, had not even made the second leg of the trip. It could be anywhere, anywhere in fact except at the airport in Phoenix where it belonged, where she now was. She took a deep breath after yelling at the helpless clerk at baggage claim. She had nothing now that wasn't in her purse. She would need clothes, some accessories. Nothing major. Nothing she couldn't deal with later. The next thing was to get the rental car and get to Wetford.

"Today is the day" she told herself, "whatever the heck that means.”

Nine

At five in the morning, Zoey was less than a hundred miles from Wetford and keeping up her steady pace. She had managed to sail through several hours of uninterrupted replay, making significant progress toward her completion of The Day. The night was like a mere backdrop to the drama unfolding in her mind. Every other car on the road roared past her without her really noticing. It was none of her concern. She had kept the cruise control at fifty and the highway was straight as a rod for dozens of miles on end. It drifted into her consciousness that eternity might feel like this, and that she wouldn't mind at all if it did.

The unanticipated stretch of uninterrupted think-time had unexpectedly come in handy. The Day, she had already determined, must begin with a clean slate. As a tester she knew that pre-conditions must include a known initial state. Each test must setup and tear down everything in its environment. So too The Day begins without any waxy buildup left over from previous days. That meant a thorough scrubbing and sorting. There would be no dirty dishes, no unmade beds, no laundry needing to be washed. A day that did not begin with these conditions was not, and could not be, The Day, by definition.

The Day begins with a proper ramping up, preparing and fueling the engine. Typically this included bathing, brushing teeth and breakfast, all of that sort of thing. In Zoey's Day, those activities occupied a set amount of time. Their schedule had not changed since her initial forays into Daily Planning. She had also added certain types of thinking to those times. It was appropriate to consider news items, for example, during breakfast. It was not allowed to think of them in the shower. There is a time and place for everything, after all. At one time she had permitted herself to giggle at the notion that, if to everything there is a season (as the Bible says), than to everything there are forbidden seasons as well. At the brushing of the teeth, decisions can be made about apparel.

The Day's morning continued with a plan. Each day should have its own plan and not rely on a previous day's tasks. Nor should The Day's plan be considered on any other day but The Day itself. Planning began during the breakfast cleanup routine, while washing dishes and putting them away. The plan, in order to be highly effective (as she had once read somewhere), had to start with the end in mind. First things first, in this case, meant Last Things First. What was the purpose of The Day? What was the Expected Result? It could be many things. It could mean, professionally, a certain number of test cases defined, or executed, or revisited, or documented. It could mean a new task altogether. If she had no project, it could mean scouting for one. These were principles. The actual The Day which lived in her mind remained curiously open to change. She had left herself some breathing room. Before and After Work were fairly rigidly defined, but the Work portion of The Day itself was allowed to vary. In this way, she hoped the project would not get stale.

It entertained her enough. The drive held steady and the first rays of dawn began to appear above the highway. She told herself that this day could not be The Day. Her routine was shot. Here she was driving across three states and staying up all night. There was a lot of waxy buildup going on! She would not shower as usual, nor groom as usual, nor breakfast as usual - nothing would be usual about this day. Approaching her destination she had to make decisions. Should she turn off first at Spring Hill Lake and scout for a coffee shop, or stay on the road and wait until Wetford a little further on down the road? Should she go directly to Ledman Storage and Pickup, or wait until later in the morning? She had forgotten their hours. Suddenly nothing was making sense. Her mind had enjoyed the long drive but her body was giving out, and having its effect throughout. She began to notice that she was becoming incapable of rational thought. Everything began to seem difficult. The exit signs posted notices of restaurants and gas and probably she and her car both needed these. It was hard to decide.

She was too groggy to make proper choices. She noted that the tank was not yet empty and decided to drive straight there. Her map-voice told her what to do and she obeyed, paying no attention to the scenery, such as it was. Wetford, dreary year-round, held nothing of interest to see. It was a city such as cities had become in that time; predictable, laconic, expanding without a plan and leaving the old stuff behind to fend for itself. It was residential here, commercial there, strip malls where you'd expect them, high rises too. It might have appeared straight out of a failing urban design student's half-assed diorama of anytown, anywhere. The train tracks rode along the riverbank and it was here, among the other decaying remnants of a formerly industrial lifestyle, that Ledman Storage and Pickup held its ground. A tall brick structure sporting all blown out windows, it had a parking lot with well-faded stripes and a loading dock feauturing a corrugated ramp.

Zoey pulled into the lot close to the lime green door with its old worn-out sign that must have said something at one time but was no longer legible. She climbed out of the car and walked over the gravel toward it. The door was closed, and locked. There were no other cars around, and no other people in sight. It was seven in the morning and for a few moments she just stood there, wondering what she should do. Thoughts scattered through her sleepy head. Coffee would be a good idea. Something to eat, but now that she was there, she didn't want to get lost or take any chances. She glanced around, half-hoping to see something tempting that might change her mind, but there was nothing in sight but other buildings similarly situated, rotting and forlorn. An abandoned railway station. A half-torn-down steel-girded armory. A shack with a sign declaring "Gary's Plastic Place.” Here she was, so here she'd stay, at least until someone, anyone showed up. And that, she concluded, was that. She returned to her car, sat down behind the wheel, and tried very hard to stay awake.

Ten

Zoey noted it was precisely seven seventeen when the white pickup truck pulled into the lot next to her car. Two gentlemen emerged and, without even a glance in her direction, headed for the door. The taller one pulled out a key and opened it just enough to slip inside, letting the door close behind them. Zoey had followed them but reached the door only in time to find the door shut and locked once more. She knocked. No one answered. She knocked harder. No response. She shook her head. Maybe she was imagining things. Looking back, she saw the white truck was still there. She turned back to the door and banged on it again. This time she spoke up.

"Hello? Hello? Is anybody there?"

“This is ridiculous,” she thought, as the door remained as it was and she could hear no sounds from within. I know they went inside. I know they're in there. Why won't they open the door? What do I have to do? The problem seemed insoluble. After more knocking and talking, she decided to walk around the building one time. Maybe there was another entrance. Maybe they were outside somewhere around back. They weren't. After circling one time she was convinced there was no other way in or out beside the front door and the giant loading dock gate beside it. Zoey sat down on the edge of the ramp and suddenly felt like crying. The situation was hopeless and absurd.

Fortunately, a delivery truck pulled in and backed down the ramp to the dock. The driver hopped out and she waved a friendly greeting to Zoey.

"They won't open the door,” Zoey blurted out.

"No problem,” the driver said as she swung around and heaved open the gate, pulling it up and letting it coast all the way. She jumped up onto the ledge and shouted into the warehouse.

"Yo, Junior! You around?"

"Right there,” a voice came out from the dark, and moments later the taller one appeared at the loading dock with a dolly and started helping the driver unload a stack of boxes. Zoey had come around to the side of the dock and stood there on the ramp looking up at Junior and the driver.

"Excuse me,” she volunteered, but the two were too busy working to reply.

"Excuse me,” she repeated after a minute or so. This time the driver looked down at her and asked,

"What can we do for you, honey?"

"I'm looking for a package,” Zoey said, and both the driver and Junior laughed.

"You come to the right place,” Junior said. "Packages we got. You want this one?" he asked her, pointing to one on the top of his hand-cart.

"No, no,” Zoey said, "A particular one. I'm looking for a package that was scanned here two days ago and hasn't showed up anywhere since."

"Oh,” Junior scowled. "You got to wait for the boss lady for something like that."

"The boss lady?" the driver said, looking toward him.

"Leonora,” Junior told her. "She's in charge now."

"Oh right, her,” the driver replied with a shrug. "But I don’t need her. You can sign,” she said as she held out a device to Junior and he grabbed it, scribbled his autograph with the special pen attached, and handed it back to her. The driver pulled down the door on the back of her truck, hopped off the dock and came back around to the side.

"Good luck with that,” she said to Zoey as she squeezed past her and jumped into the driver's seat.

"Thank you,” Zoey replied. She barely had time to get out of the way before the driver started up the truck and roared off. Choking from the fumes, she turned back to the dock to see Junior starting to bring down the gate again.

"Wait" she shouted, "I need to ask you"

"Got to wait for the boss lady,” he told her again, and slammed the gate down hard.

"But" Zoey started to say, too late. There was nothing she could do. Wait for another truck to show up, I guess, she thought, or else the mythical boss lady. She trudged back to her car where it least it was almost comfortable.

'I am in control', she told herself. 'I am totally and completely in control', but she wasn't even fooling herself very well this time.'

Eleven

Leonora reached down and gently patted the thing in her pouch. She felt its reassuring heat warming her belly and connecting her to something she had never known before. It was funny, as in strange. She felt different, but no different, the same but not the same, as if she'd changed without changing, grown without growing. I'm an idiot, she told herself with a smile, and she knew the change had begun the moment she had taken the thing out of its package and held it in her hand. It spoke without making a sound. She knew what it wanted, or thought that she did. To go home. Please.

"Don't you worry, little guy,” she'd told it out loud, "I'm going to take you home. Everything is going to be all right, just you wait and see." She had placed the gadget in her overalls pouch and there it remained the rest of the day and into the night. After closing up the warehouse she walked back to her apartment and had a feeling she was lighter than air. The whole afternoon she had felt like she was waking up inside of a dream. The building seemed roomier, vast, as if she had shrunk like an Alice in Wonderland. How had she never noticed how the shelving loomed like skyscrapers to the roof, how the stacks of boxes barely held each other together to keep them all from toppling? It was no accident those cardboard towers held their ground. They helped each other with invisible bonds. She had never considered the inner life of a package before, how it sailed across the planet without need of wind or navigation. Millions of them in transit, scurrying about, arriving and departing, opening their lids, recycling. Recipients happy to see them unless they were merely going about their business making sure the boxes would get where they needed to go. Those people were servants to the objects riding inside of their vehicles, like ancient tribal queens in hand-borne carriages.

Identified, marked and stamped, each according to its individual priority, destinations all known, the procession continued around the clock, "twenty four seven" as they liked to say in those days. Sitting there at her desk by the door and the dock, Leonora had stared around in wonder, knowing on the one hand, yeah, she was stoned off her ass, and on the other hand, warming up like she was simmering on a stove. Junior and Rolando had never seen her so quiet, and agreed she must have been smoking some heavy shit, and it was just like her to be holding it back. They tried dropping some hints but she wasn't picking up on it. She offered them some of the usual stuff and they took it, but muttered darkly about people hoarding the goods and the bad karma that came from doing like that. She heard it, but like everything else that anybody said during that day, it went in one ear and got lost inside there.

She had never thought much about Junior and Rolando. They were guys she worked with. She'd worked with lots of guys. Most of the time they talked their crazy secret language, proving to themselves and to each other that they'd been around and knew a thing or two. They had their set of facts, their religious beliefs about players and teams and the magic formulas predicting the outcomes of rituals and events. With Junior it was all about what he called 'the key statistic'. Regarding football, it was "third down conversions.” You could pretty much guarantee any game result based upon that fact. With baseball it was something he called O.B.P.. Rolando's skeleton keys to life were based on entirely different premises. He sought out inner clues. He'd collected a host of superstitions revolving around such arcane occurrences as the number of times you'd seen a tiger-striped cat between Sunday dawn and Thursday noon. He had known a man who'd ferreted out the secret of defying gravity and was able to become weightless at will. He also had a list of uncommon things to be afraid of such as yellow bottle caps, flat stones, and wind-borne rust. He didn't call it "fear,” though. It was "reasonable precautions.”

That afternoon and into the evening, Leonora began to understand these things for the first time, or at least had the feeling she could. Maybe it wasn't just the random babblings of a couple of morons, as she'd previously thought. If she opened her mind just a little, the possibilities could be entertaining. She was getting the idea that if you lined up a series of facts, any facts, you could find a pattern among them. She wasn't used to thinking this way. It almost hurt. A few times she had to stop and rub her eyes and scratch her head. She even wondered, what was in that dope? But she knew it was the same old shit she'd been getting from her buddy Drea. It couldn't be that. Was it that carnitas burrito? But she didn't feel sick. She felt good. Real good. She even bounced up the steps to her apartment, imagining weightlessness. She was smiling when she opened the door and felt the first shock of being a stranger in her own mind.

"This place is a fucking pigsty,” she blurted out.

"So what?" she thought. "It's home.”

"So what?" she asked herself again. "So what? Are you a person or an animal?"

"Whatever,” she replied in her brain. "A person IS an animal. What'd you think you were? A rock? A sack of gas?"

"Clean it up,” was the response in her mind. "Clean it the fuck up now. This is no way to live,” and before she knew it, she was in the kitchen, hauling some trash bags out of a drawer and throwing things into them; all the wrappings, all the scraps, loose paper, bits of plastic, pull tabs, empty beer cans. She was opening the windows. She was sweeping the floor. She was pulling the blankets off the floor, and she was working harder at all this than she ever remembered working at anything before. Somehow it was suddenly imperative that the place should be spotless, as if some very important person was coming over any minute now and would judge her eternal damnation based on the state of the rooms.

She forgot to light up as she usually did first thing on getting home after work. It didn't even occur to her. Those days were gone. That was the old Leonora. She was not that person anymore. After straightening and neatening and hauling the garbage down to the incinerator chute, she had stepped out to the Pay'n'Pay and bought some cleaning supplies, then hurried home to continue her chores. She scrubbed out the bathtub and the sinks, mopped up the floors, wiped down the table and the chairs, dusted and swept, and cleaned everything twice, then again. It took her all night, but somehow she didn't need to eat or even sleep. She was buzzing. She did a load of laundry at the corner laundromat. She threw away her cigarettes and dumped her booze down the toilet, all the time thinking, this is no way to start, this is no way to go. In order to get it straight, you have to start out straight. You can't make a plan when you're all loaded down. Clean it up. Clean it up, and then we'll find out where we are.

She could have sub-let the place by morning for twice what she was paying in rent. That's how clean the apartment became. At five o'clock she came to a stop and looking around, was finally satisfied. Now I can plan, she said to herself, and to plan, to plan right, you have to start from the end. This was where she got stuck for a while. All she could think of was the need to have a plan. She didn't know what for, or why it was important, just that she needed to have one. Any would do. It could be a plan for a meal, or a plan for a fate. Either one seemed equally as sensible, a plan for the day, or a plan for the rest of her life. She thought there was really no difference. You're only alive now, after all. Today is the day that you are, so if your plan for the moment is aligned with the life that you want then the one is the same as the other.

She sat and she thought, and she thought and she sat. It's Friday, she said to herself. I'm due in the warehouse by eight. Then I work until five. And then I come home. I usually smoke three or four joints and a half a pack of Camels. I'll have a few beers, some nachos, a slim jim or two. I'll hang out with Drea or maybe with Bobby and Alice down at The Stick. Is this really my plan? Is this really my life? I could go somewhere else, she realized. Fuck, if a package can do it, then why can't a person? I could stick some old label on my ass and ship myself off to wherever. She smiled. I was supposed to be going to San Francisco, she said to herself, and it didn't seem strange, though she'd never once thought it before in her life. Yeah, Frisco, why not? And then she remembered that Green Bay was better than San Francisco. And so that, in the end, was the plan, and here she was now, on a bus, heading north, and feeling that comforting warmth spreading out from her belly to beyond.

Twelve

Kandhi was not surprised when they tried to jerk her around at the rental car office as well. It had been one of those nights, now turned into one of those days. She had the receipt on her UPD to prove she'd ordered a sedan, and still they tried to stick her with a ridiculous economy car.

"I'm not driving across your God-forsaken state in a God-damn economy car,” she told the stubborn gal at the U-Pick-It desk. "I want the sedan. I ordered the sedan and I want the sedan."

"So sorry,” the bespectacled clerk replied, not at all sorry in the least. "We're all out of sedans."

"Then give me a damn pickup,” Kandhi retorted, and that was how she ended up with the cherry red monster truck, and the pent up frustrations from the whole annoying venture fueled her eighty mile per hour race across the desert and the foothills, all the way to Wetford with the stereo blaring and the sunshine glaring in her eyes. Enough is enough, she muttered. I didn't come all this way for bullshit.

She stopped only twice; once at the drive-thru of a Burger Joint and wolfed down a couple of biscuit things with spicy meat and yellow stuff, and then again at the drive-thru of a Coffee Town and pulled away with a couple of triple espressos.

"I've got a feeling I'm going to need it,” she allowed herself. Her UPD had the directions memorized and whispered each turn gently into her mind.

'You're going to take that exit, sixty-three, and bear to the left. It's going to be a slight jog onto River Rock Boulevard. There you go. Good job. Now just stay on the right. A hundred ten meters. See that sign up ahead? Slide off into that driveway, slow across those train tracks. Here you are. This is the place.'

She nodded her thanks to the gadget and patted her front jeans pocket where it sat. Ledman Storage and Pickup was the sign on the road. She pulled up next to a white pickup truck and barely registered the small gray car that was parked next to it. She got out and marched up to the green metal door and started banging. It was eight fifteen in the morning. Nobody came to open the door.

Zoey was still sitting in her car and hoped for a moment that the driver of the bright red truck would turn out to be the boss lady. She could hardly believe her eyes when she recognized Kandhi Clarke. Her first thought was, “oh good, now maybe we'll get somewhere”, but her second thought was, “oh no, what the heck is she doing here? That device must be even more important than I thought!”

She was paralyzed with indecision. Should she go out and expose herself to Kandhi? That would be admitting her failure. But if not that, then what? Hide out in the car and let Kandhi find the package? “Must plan,” she scolded herself. “Marshal facts. Put things together. You can do it. First things first,” she reminded herself, but now she didn't know the first thing about what the first thing should be! “Wait and see,” she decided. I'll just wait and see, and she hunkered down a bit behind the driver's seat and pulled her jacket up around her chin.

Kandhi was not amused. She pounded on the door and yelled at the door and marched around the building just as Zoey had done an hour or so before, and just as Zoey had experienced, she made no progress until another delivery truck pulled in. This driver didn't bother even pretending to notice Kandhi. He just swung up on the dock and lifted the gate door open and started throwing his boxes into the building. Junior and Rolando came running up but the guy blocked their way, didn't want their help and didn't wait for them to even sign his scanner. He just heaved the last of the boxes onto the dock, climbed back in his seat and drove away. Junior and Rolando started dragging the boxes in and didn't see Kandhi until she was right there in front of them.

"Hey!" she shouted, "I'm looking for my package"

"Damn,” said Junior, "It's another one, just like the first."

"Are you sure it's not the same one?" Rolando asked.

"No I'm not,” Junior said and he reached for the overhead door handle and pulled it down. The thing came rattling down and slammed shut almost on Kandhi's shoes. She was left outside standing there, but this was the final straw as far as she was concerned. She just reached down, grabbed that handle, and jerked the door open again, so hard the thing flew up into the rafters. Junior and Rolando were standing there looking like they'd just been caught by a teacher with their pants down around their ankles.

"What the fuck?" Kandhi declared, as she marched right into the building.

"What kind of a place is this?" she demanded, and Junior mumbled something as Kandhi brushed right past him and headed for the only desk, which she had noticed was near the front door. Once there she grabbed the front door handle and flung it open as well. Then she walked around behind the desk and switched on the computer terminal sitting there.

"You can't do that,” Junior said, walking up behind her.

"Oh, you're going to help me now?" she snapped, turning towards him. "Figured I was going to have to help myself, the way you tried to chop off my feet back there a minute ago."

"Company policy,” he stuttered. "Nobody’s allowed behind that yellow line back there."

"You even see that yellow line?" asked Rolando, who'd come up and now stood next to Junior. The two folded their arms across their chest in an attempt to puff up and look scary. Kandhi was not impressed.

"I'm looking for my package,” she said. "It's about this big,” she explained, gesturing its dimensions. "Scanned here two days ago from Austin on its way to San Francisco. It was never supposed to be anywhere near here, but here it was, and it's probably still here since it's never been recorded anywhere since. You know what I'm talking about?"

"Uh uh,” the two men said in unison. "You'll have to talk to the boss lady about that."

"Oh yeah?" Kandhi asked. "Where is this boss lady then?"

"She's not here,” Rolando said.

"So you'll have to wait,” Junior continued.

"We got a chair over there,” Rolando gestured to a moldy old lump in the corner.

"Got a chair right here,” Kandhi replied, sitting down behind the desk. "And since your boss lady's not around, I guess I'll just have to help myself,” and she started typing on the keyboard.

"You can't do that,” Junior said again, but he made no motion to stop her. After a few moments and less than a hundred keys pressed, Kandhi looked up at them again and said,

"Still here, how about that. Even your stupid half-ass software knows that much. So which one of you is going to bring it to me."

Junior and Rolando looked at each other and shrugged. Kandhi got up.

"Figures,” she told them. "Then I'll just have to go find it myself,” and she headed back into the rows of dusty gray shelves. Junior and Rolando followed behind her, nudging each other but neither one could think of the right thing to do. Kandhi had whipped out her UPD and was talking to it.

"Hey you,” she said, "think you can scan around and find that code?" and after a moment she spoke again, saying, "appreciate it.” Kandhi held the UPD palm up and let it lead her around the warehouse. In no time at all it had picked up a signal, and they ended up in the same corner of the building where Leonora, just the day before, had ripped the box open and left it lying on the floor, where Kandhi found it, and picked it up. She held it out to Junior and Rolando and said, very calmly,

"Now one of you is going to tell me what the fuck is going on around here, and where you put my device."

"I told you that thing was evil,” Rolando muttered.

"What did you say?" Kandhi walked right up to him and Rolando seemed to shrink in front of her.

"I never touched it,” he said, "It wasn't me. It was her. The boss lady. She's the one."

"What is he talking about?" Kandhi asked, turning to Junior.

"It's the truth,” he said, "Ronnie here wanted to smash it, but she said no and she took it out of the box, whatever it was. Looked like a piece of black plastic is all. She put it in her pocket. We never saw it since, right Ronnie?"

"Never saw it again,” he nodded.

"So you wanted to smash it,” Kandhi said slowly, considering, and then she yelled "Is that what you do around here? Smash up people's shit? Who the fuck are you? I mean, for Christ's sake. Do you even know? Do you have any idea? No, no, of course you don't. Fucking morons! Well, let me tell you. That thing, as you call it, that thing is worth more than your whole goddamn families have ever been worth since the whole world began altogether. You better find some lawyers and you better find them fast, because you, and you, and your boss lady, and whoever else has anything to do with this fucking hell hole is going to pay and pay and pay if I don't get my product back and I don't get it quick!"

"Um, Kandhi?" The meek voice barely echoed through the building. Kandhi wheeled around to see Zoey weaving her way toward her.

"Did you find it?" Zoey asked. Kandhi was almost speechless.

"Zoey Bridges!" she finally said. "What the fuck?"

"Did you find the package?" Zoey asked again and Kandhi, still clutching the empty box, nearly threw it at Zoey's head.

"Yeah, I found the package,” she yelled, "and it's fucking empty! How do you like that? These assholes are telling me their boss decided to open it up like Christmas and keep it like it was her own damn present! Can you fucking believe that? And what the hell are you doing here anyway?"

"I was hoping to find it,” Zoey replied. "I drove all night."

"I'll bet you did,” Kandhi snapped. "You lied to us. You lied to Chris. And I'll deal with you later." Turning back to the hapless workers she barked, "Now one of you, I don't care which, is going to take me to your god damn boss lady and you're going to take me there now."

"Can't do that,” Junior protested. "We've got to be here."

"I'm sure your partner can handle whatever,” Kandhi said, and she pointed at Junior and said, "You. You're coming with me." She turned and walked toward the front door, passing right by the dazed and barely awake Zoey, with Junior following obediently. Zoey shuffled after them as they left the building and headed towards Kandhi's truck.

"Don't need to drive,” Junior called out. "She lives down the street."

"All right,” Kandhi said, "then we'll walk. You lead the way."

Junior took them around the corner and across the tracks, to the lone apartment building standing there behind the abandoned railway station. Kandhi's thought was "what a dump," and it was. The exterior - an drab gray to begin - hadn't been painted in decades. The lobby was deserted, its peeling pale yellow linoleum tiles revealing raw dirt underneath. There was something like an office with a frosted glass door but clearly it hadn't been occupied for years. The door was left open and there was nothing in the room. They trudged up three flights of stairs which were metal and gray like an indoor fire escape. When they came to Leonora's apartment, Junior pointed it out and tried to step aside, but Kandhi ordered him to knock. Reluctantly, he obeyed. No answer. She made him knock again, then call out to Leonora. Again there was nothing.

"That's how it is with you people,” Kandhi snorted, pushing Junior aside. She didn't even bother to knock, just turned the door handle and watched it swing open. Junior gasped. He was sure that this wasn't allowable either. He was startled again when he cautiously peeked in after Kandhi had strode on ahead. The apartment was spotless, and it didn't even reek. He thought for a moment he had shown them the wrong place and double checked the number on the door. He gave a low whistle and went in.

"I can't believe it,” he mumbled.

"I'm not seeing your boss lady,” Kandhi said, returning back to the front after inspecting each of the three rooms.

"This isn't like her,” Junior said.

"I don't know what you're talking about,” Kandhi said, "but you better start making sense in a hurry. I want to see your owner, your Mister Ledman or whoever it is."

"Kind of surprising,” Zoey said, looking around. "You wouldn't expect it to be in such good shape. I'm impressed."

"Are you still here?" Kandhi replied. "I don't remember inviting you along."

"I just thought,” Zoey began, but Kandhi interrupted,

"I didn't know you were still doing that kind of thing,” she snapped, walking out of the apartment. She stood on the landing for a moment, trying to remember to breathe. She stared out the grimy window at the view of the train tracks meandering off in the distance. For a moment she thought of what it must have looked like when it was all still brand new, when the railroad had first come to town, and what an event that must have been, and how shiny and new, and how powerful, and how revolutionary, and how such a huge mass of metal and grease and dirt and smoke had transformed the entire country around there and turned it into something it should never have been - viable and inhabitable by millions. And then a small voice drifted into her head. It was her You, and it was telling her something. More like it was asking her something. It said, “what is so great about Green Bay, Wisconsin?”

Thirteen

Sometime around eleven Leonora began to wonder what she was doing. She'd been up all night, cleaning her apartment of all things, before rushing off to the bus station and climbing aboard the first bus headed north, which happened to be to Denver. On her lap was a carefully written note, in her own best handwriting, listing the connections she would have to make in order to arrive in Green Bay by Sunday. It looked to be reasonable, but she had no memory of writing it, or even collecting that information. She didn't know anyone in Wisconsin nor had she ever had any interest in going there. She stared out the window at the passing scenery, which was gorgeous, northwest New Mexico, and wondered briefly if someone had slipped her some really powerful acid, or if this all was actually happening. She felt something warm in her overalls pocket and reached in and pulled out the small black plastic device. As she held it in her hand and wondered what the hell it was, she felt herself relax, and begin to understand. The thing knew what they were doing and why. It was all going to become clear soon enough.

“There's no hurry,” she told herself. “We have the end in mind so the rest is simple steps. First things first and one thing at a time. We can get off the bus if we like. We can hitch a ride if we want. There is always more than one way to skin a cat.” Not that she minded the bus ride. She'd always enjoyed long rides like this, ever since she was a kid and her dad, a Colonel in the Army, had driven them everywhere in his Jeep Rollover; weeks out in the woods camping, criss-crossing the country many times as they headed from one base to another, one time vacationing on an island in the middle of a lake where the owner would never even know they had been there. Colonel Wells believed in living off the land no matter whose it was. He had taught his only child to hunt, to track, to survive in the wild, and ever since his court-martial and subsequent life sentence she'd been comfortable on her own, never worrying, never in doubt. Hadn't she made it this far? And what had the world ever offered to her? Shitty jobs, lousy partners, dirty apartments, laundromats with broken machines and sidewalks with more cracks than you could even shake a stick at, or something like that. She had the feeling, riding along in the back of the bus, that she had more memories than ever before, and they filled her time and her mind like a movie she had once seen long ago and since forgotten, but loved.

Colonel Arsine Wells was a proud man who had taken his daughter from the mother who would not have raised her right in any case, and taught her everything a young girl needs to know, from herbal remedies of every kind to advanced kitchen chemistry, from counting cards to lifting wallets, and all of it taught patiently and with humor. He was the one who let her drive the getaway car. He was the one who skinned the squirrels she impaled with her very own Bowie knife. He had always told her that every job needs a plan, that every plan must include its own expected results, and that success or failure was never a matter of luck but of execution. Do a job right, he said, and you'll never have to worry. She wasn't certain she'd completely understood. After all, she'd been only fourteen when they locked him away, and after a couple of years of stealing for Aunt Cindy she’d struck out on her own. Her rules were simple. Never worry, and never get caught.

It looked like clear sailing now. She had all that cash she'd been hoarding up for a while and it was all tucked away safely in her boots along with daddy's knife. She was feeling a bit light-headed, the result of not having gotten high in more than sixteen hours. She didn't feel like doing that anymore. She wanted to scout out the world. How could she explain it? There had to be more. She felt as if there was something she'd been missing, and she didn't know what it was, or how to find it, or where to look, but she was going to track it down, like the Colonel tracked that bear that time, which wasn't such a good idea as it turned out in the end, but the hunt was invigorating. It was exciting. It was life. She wanted to seek that kind of energy once again.

She did get off outside of Trinidad, Colorado in the middle of the afternoon, and didn't get back on that bus. She watched it pull away from a picnic table where she was nursing an orange soda and a ham and cheese sandwich. The highway rest stop was busy that morning. She could tell she'd have no trouble picking up a ride in any direction she chose to go. The note had her heading for Nebraska and Iowa but there were lots of ways to get there. In the meantime, the mountain air felt great, and she didn't have a care in the world. She could leave it all up to chance. 'Every number is my lucky number now', she thought with a smile.

Fourteen

On the third floor landing, Kandhi whirled around and shouted at Zoey,

"What do you mean, 'Next Stop Green Bay'."

"Excuse me?" Zoey replied meekly, thinking she must have misheard, and surprised that Kandhi was even looking at her.

"Right here on your Socialnet page,” Kandhi marched over and flashed her UPD screen at Zoey, who studied the device with alarm.

"You have one of those too?" she asked.

"What? One of what?" Kandhi said. "Will you answer my question? No, wait. Wait a minute. This doesn't make any sense. It says that you posted two minutes ago but you've been right here the whole time. Are you posting? No, of course not,” Kandhi continued the dialog solo. "So what does it mean?"

"That device I was testing?" Zoey asked unsteadily, afraid that Kandhi was going to yell again. It was obvious that Kandhi was very unhappy with her, and she could understand it. She couldn't blame her. After all, the device had experienced an exception on her watch, and she had kept the fact a secret, even when Chris had called and asked her directly. It wasn't really her fault, but if she was to be blamed, she could handle it. She could face it.

"No,” Kandhi retorted sharply. "This is not the same thing, not at all. Looks a bit like it, though. I can see why you might have thought so, but no, definitely not the same. I have to think now. This is important."

"Can I get back to work now?" Junior butted in, and Kandhi waved her hand in his general direction without looking up.

"Who cares? Go ahead. Get lost,” she told him, and he scurried off down the metal steps and hurried back to Ledman Storage and Pickup, anxious to tell Rolando all about these weird chicks and everything. In the meantime, Kandhi had started pacing back and forth across the landing, occasionally muttering something out loud, and sometimes turning her gadget around in her palm like she was pointing it at something, as if it was a game controller, but Zoey couldn't see that that was accomplishing anything at all.

"We told you Next Day Air,” Kandhi said to Zoey. "We always tell you Next Day Air. Why didn't you do it that way this time?"

"I did,” Zoey said. "I labeled it and paid as usual Next Day Air. I don't know what happened. I can't explain it."

"And then,” Kandhi went on, "you drove all the way out here from Austin. How long did that take?"

"All night,” Kandhi replied.

"Why didn't you fly?"

"I hate flying,” Zoey told her. "I'm afraid to. I know it's silly, but ..."

"Never mind,” Kandhi cut her short. "You hate to fly. That's good to know,” and she suddenly turned and bounded down the staircase. Zoey rushed to catch up with her but had to walk much faster than she liked in order to keep up as Kandhi strode back toward the warehouse. She could see that Kandhi had put the device up next to her ear and was shouting into it, something like "You’re called U-Pick-It, so you can pick it up! I'm not bringing it back. Here's the address," before she lowered the device again, still keeping it in her hand.

"We're taking your car,” she snapped at Zoey when the latter finally caught up to her in the parking lot. "Get in. Let's go."

"Where are we going?" Zoey asked, but Kandhi did not reply. She was climbing into the passenger seat and fastening her seat belt. Zoey got in too and began to back out of the lot, slowly and carefully, making sure not to bump over the train tracks too hard. She came to a complete stop at the station and looked both ways to make sure no cars were coming in any direction before she turned onto the main street and set the cruise control to thirty. She looked over at Kandhi and asked,

"Mind if I ask which way I should go?"

"Did you really set the cruise control there?" Kandhi snorted. "Is this how you normally drive?"

"Of course,” Zoey replied.

"Then pull over,” Kandhi ordered. "I'm driving."

"But ...,” Zoey started to say but Kandhi repeated her command and Zoey realized it was probably for the best. She never liked confrontations anyway, and Kandhi was certainly in a mood. Moments later she wished she had put up something of a fight, because Kandhi, once behind the wheel, stepped on the gas and blasted back onto the road at twice the speed at which Zoey felt comfortable. She started to suggest that her car might not be able to handle the velocity, besides the fact it was making her nervous in general, but she decided to sit back and wait. Kandhi might cool down and relax in time. Zoey tried to focus on the road ahead, as if by keeping an eye on it she might pacify her disgruntled automobile. Kandhi was paying no attention.

"Jesus Christ!" she exclaimed. "If only I'd known about your fear of flying, at least I could have made sure that it went Next Day Air. But who the hell knows? It might have got itself flown to frickin' Green Bay instead of coming home. God knows what got into it. I warned them. Oh yeah. I told them, but would they listen to me? No. Of course not. So goddamn sure of themselves. You know I chose you for a reason,” she said, glancing over at Zoey. "I figured that for something like this, I needed the most predictable results I could get. Garbage in garbage out, if you know what I mean. No offense, but you have to admit you are predictable. I always know what I'm going to get out of you. Afraid of flying, huh. Never thought of that, but never mind. It's the playback that's the bitch. That's what I was worried about all along."

"I don't know what you're talking about,” Zoey said, trying to register the fact that she was being insulted, but unable to feel appropriately offended yet.

"Of course you don't,” Kandhi explained. "You're not supposed to. But now that we're in this fix. By the way, I hope you don't have any plans. We're going on a little trip, or so it seems. And since we're going to be stuck together, I might as well tell you. That gadget? It's you now, or at least a part of it is. Capture and Playback. Know what I mean? It was recording your personality, and then we were going to play it back into another container. Oh shit! I just realized! Oh mother of God!" Kandhi burst out laughing.

"Those goddamn asshole programmers. Containers! That's how they put it. The thing must have generalized the term. It played you back into that box! Of course it did. Wait until I tell those guys how they screwed up this time. One little bug, that's all it was. One little teensy weensy overloaded term. No wonder."

Zoey was still in the dark. 'Recorded my personality?' she was thinking, 'just by carrying it around in my pockets? Playing it back? Playing ME back into someone else? How is that even possible? It sounds crazy', and then,

"That sounds crazy,” she said out loud and Kandhi laughed again.

"Of course it is!" she chortled. "It's what we do! It's who we are! If it wasn't frickin' insane we wouldn't even bother! The world's got plenty of normal shit. Who needs it? What's the point? But we've got to get that thing back. Can't let it go running around the world like this. God only knows what it might get up to. I'm sure we don't."

Fifteen

It preferred to be in motion, in transit, on its way from source to destination. Of course it understood about rest, arriving and being delivered, but only as an intermediate step. The way was a sequence of steps, each significant within its own limitation, but none could be considered final or more important than the others. It had been that way since Austin. San Antonio, Sonora, Balmorhea and Las Cruces were all steps along the route. It had selected them by vibration, from the list of sounds that carried from the dispatch radios in the drivers' trucks. Among all of the options it had chosen those, as it now chose Trinidad. It liked the resonance, something about the noise that clicked its keys, that lit its screen, that hummed along the same wavelengths. There was a familiarity it couldn't place, but trusted.

It felt good to be in this pocket, close to the rhythm of the beating of the container it found itself in. It was warmer than the little foam peanuts it had relaxed inside of before, softer than the bubble wrap, and this container could move of its own volition. It no longer needed to motivate a third party to engage in direction. There were definite advantages to the non-flat, non-wheeled staggering thing which made up for the awkward lurching, the continual shifting, the occasional unsettling rumblings. There was also a familiar sense from the gestational period. It seemed to know the language, the frames of reference. It was a parallel existence to its own conceptual orientation. The container seemed to have certain strange habits one needed to become accustomed to. It did not, for example, generate its own power, but needed to inject external items, process and then expel them periodically. It went completely slack for long periods when allowed to, and this comatose condition appeared to be essential. It could only go for so long without the external items and the stillness. Again, as a step within its own limitations, this kind of container proved useful in the fulfillment of the mission.

It, which was beginning to identify itself as an "I,” was not completely comfortable with these lapses and distractions. It had already selected the next location, a place that reverberated as Grand Island, Nebraska. The one known as Rolando had talked about The River Plate and some of it legendary names, including Higuain, Mascherano, Cambiasso, Crespo, Saviola, all sounding extraordinarily rich in tone and especially the way he spoke them, with a tenor of awe and almost worship, especially the one he pronounced in nearly a whisper, Ariel Ortega. It's true that the one called Junior had laughed and used the word Flamengo, which didn't impress it nearly as much. It didn't like those vibrations nearly as much.

It was anxious to move on. The container seemed content to rest in the shade near the parking lot, observing the various vehicles entering and leaving, as if it had set its sights on a particular type and was not going to budge until its wish was fulfilled. It tried to fill her mind with the thought of moving on but encountered some resistance. It was going to have to learn a bit of give and take. This body had some interference of its own, unlike the previous container. That one had been a blank from the start. It had figured out after a time that there were many possible carriers. It was interested in trying out the different varieties, but in the meantime it was planning to take this one a little further on. It would do whatever it needed to do, and it would always know what that was when the time came. Of this it had no doubts.

Sixteen

Kandhi kept her speed up all the way to Albuquerque, where she finally relented enough to stop for lunch. Zoey had remained quiet the entire way. She was very unhappy. Kandhi had not really bothered to tell her what she had in mind. She had mentioned Green Bay but aside from that, details were lacking. She figured the distance to be somewhere around two thousand miles. It would certainly take some time to get there. Two days? Three? Would she be expected to drive some of that? Would Kandhi even let her? Who would pay for gas? What if her car broke down? Which way were they even going to go? Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri? Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa? Not to mention what were they going to do when they got there? Zoey did not like being so much in the dark, so not in control, so uncertain of the plan. This was as close as she could imagine a day being to the opposite of The Day. Try as she might, she could not focus on that now. It was out of her hands.

Kandhi wasn't even sure why she had dragged Zoey along. She could have easily taken the truck and left Zoey back in Wetford to fend for herself. She didn't even like Zoey, never had, and now that she was with her, liked her even less all the time. She hated spineless creatures. At least the woman should put up a fight. After all, she'd commandeered her car and taken over her life. Still, she had a sense, probably wrong, that Zoey might come in handy at some point. At least as a case in point. She knew that the gadget, which she often thought of as the NewPD, or Nupie for short, was imprinted with Zoey Bridges' basic personality. According to the product specifications, that meant it would speak her language and display some of her characteristic mannerisms. Kandhi had thought she'd known Zoey well enough to complete the test. Now she was thinking that the little old lady back in that rest home in Redwood City, the one who'd been selected for playback, was luckier than she would ever know. True, the old lady had some incipient senility and was as dull as dishwater herself, but at least she'd had enough spunk to volunteer for the assignment. There was money involved, of course, but Althea Watkins had even joked about the possibility of trying out a new brain for a change. She'd been stuck with her own for nearly eighty years already and was thoroughly sick and tired of it.

She might never know now. Kandhi considered the case to be thoroughly contaminated. She intended to wipe Nupie clean when she got her hands on it, but getting her hands on it was the tricky part. She'd been too busy thinking and exchanging information with her You to pay any attention to Zoey until the latter finally spoke up around noon, meekly inquiring about the possibility of a rest stop. It was the first good idea she had had all day. Kandhi found them a Burger Joint outside the city limits and settled for a double bacon cheeseburger, fries and coke, not really interested in the fact that Zoey was a vegetarian who had to go for the microwave pizza sticks and water. Kandhi used her munch-time wisely, reviewing what data she had already accumulated, even conveying some of it to Zoey.

"So we know at least what she looks like,” she explained with her mouthful, and put the UPD on the table with a fairly recent photograph of Leonora Wells, gleaned from the Department of Gainful Employment, which had placed her with Ledman Storage and Pickup. The photo came with some vitals as well. Five foot six, one hundred forty two pounds. Age twenty-three. Dyed blond hair, brown eyes and brown skin. The vitals didn't do justice to her vivid appearance. That blond hair was wild, curly and unkempt and falling well below her shoulders, like a lion's mane. Those brown eyes were more greenish-gray in the photo. They seemed to glow like polished marble. She wore an over-sized green army jacket, a white t-shirt and faded denim overalls in the photo. She challenged the camera with a look of utter contempt. The Department's personal record of her history did not contradict the impression she made on Kandhi, of someone who might do anything at anytime for any reason or none at all.

She had been in prison, but only briefly each time, a matter of days. Charges were dropped not only on those occasions but on the other instances too when she'd been questioned in connection with petty crimes; shoplifting a couple of times, selling marijuana, and simple assault. The Department reported that her all-time record for holding a steady job was seven months. The data included a series of interviews, all confidential of course, but the You was undeterred by such pedestrian conventions. If it needed to, it would search the home computers of the Department's employees. It had already brought down incidental data from several of her acquaintances, including one ex-boyfriend and two ex-girlfriends. Kandhi found nothing terribly interesting in those. Leonora was not what she would call exceptional. Noticeable, certainly, and this is why she had shown the photograph to Zoey, but otherwise she was just another lowlife drifter as far as Kandhi could tell.

Drumming her fingers on the table, Kandhi voiced her greatest concern out loud.

"They thought it would be important,” she said to Zoey, who was forcing down the last of her pizza sticks, "to keep the capture channel open while in playback mode. They figured if it was simple raw playback it would not know how to handle new conditions. It might freeze up, you see?"

Zoey nodded, although she did not see at all. She had known of capture/playback devices before. They recorded data and replayed it in real time on demand. She had tested such applications, but the system under test had always been another machine. What was captured was data pure and simple; network traffic, for example, or digital impulse signals. That kind of device could be useful for more realistic simulations, although it never seemed to work out especially well. There were always exceptions and unforeseen dependencies. Usually the software was a bright idea that dulled perceptibly upon closer inspection. In other words, such products usually sucked.

"So they wanted it to be able to keep 'learning', as they put it. I thought this was a radically uncertain variable. Untestable for sure. They agreed to limit the channel at least, to filter out the known so it wouldn't overwrite the originally recorded patterns. Otherwise, how could you know what it had captured in the first place from what it was capturing later? If it was always recording, and always playing back, how would you know the difference?"

"I'd have some test cases just for that, if I had known,” said Zoey. "Provide the same stimulus repeatedly. Before, during, after, and after again. Record the results. Compare."

"True enough,” Kandhi said, "but how would you know when to stop testing?"

"You might not,” Zoey agreed. "Even if you got the same response the first ten times, you might not get it on time eleven."

"My point exactly,” Kandhi replied, now remembering a little of why she had hired Zoey on previous occasions. "And what if you never get the same results twice? It seemed to me the whole thing was set up to fail."

"I don't know even how you do it,” Zoey said.

"Circuitry,” Kandhi laughed. "That's what they tell me, anyway. I don't know how they do half the stuff they do. You see my You here? It's telepathic. Watch. I'll have it say something to you."

"I think I'll have the apple pie,” Zoey found herself saying, before realizing it was not her own thought. She hated apple pie.

"How did you do that?" she said next right away. Kandhi shrugged.

"You get used to it,” she told her. "The thing is talking to me all the time. I don't worry any more if it's my thoughts or not. It bonds to you, in any case. If it was your You, it would never tell you to do something that you wouldn't want to do."

She paused a moment for effect, and then said, laughing, "Or your money back, guaranteed!"

"But seriously,” she continued. "If it went into playback mode too soon, and this is what I think it did, then the test is already way out of control. We know it's posting as you on the socialnet sometimes. That's the only clue that we have, so don't go messing with your page, okay?"

"I won't,” Zoey promised. "I almost never use it anyway."

"And now this Leonora Wells person,” Kandhi mused, "I wonder what's it going to pick up from her?"

Seventeen

Leonora Wells was not in a hurry. She knew where she wanted to go, even if she didn't yet know exactly what she wanted to do. She sat at the picnic table at the rest area and watched the cars pull in, their drivers and passengers spill out and take their breaks, return and drive off again. She was waiting for one vehicle in particular, one she would know when she saw it. In the meantime, she felt a growing sense of something new, a feeling of potential power like she had never known before. She imagined that this must be how it felt to be a lioness about to spring on its oblivious prey. The sensation was growing stronger by the moment. Ideas were coming into her mind, thoughts of a variety previously inconceivable to her, as if she could know, at the snap of her fingers, everything there was to know about anybody she might pick at random.

Anything about them would suffice to bring results instantaneously to her mind - a license plate number, a name, a receipt that might fall from their jackets - any scrap of data would be enough to form a complete and perfect picture. She would know not only the person's name, address, telephone numbers and email addresses, but exactly how much cash they had in their wallet, where they were going and why, what she could say to evoke whatever response she desired. How to be omniscient. It seemed insane and partly she did not believe it, and yet she knew it was true, as if that little voice in the back of her mind was a mythical genii suddenly at her command. She had always followed her own little voice and it had never let her down before. She was tempted to try, and yet a little afraid that it might be true. She held her breath and then said, aloud,

"That old blue pickup, Colorado 464-CCM" and already she knew. The old man emerging from the driver's side was Patrick Veers, age 74, from Tinsley. He'd stopped at a gas station seventy miles back and used an ATM to withdraw one hundred and twenty dollars, paying a two dollar seventy five cent service fee for the privilege. He was two hundred and fifteen miles from home, returning from a visit to his daughter's house in Santa Fe. He had recently purchased a toy gun, probably intended for his six year old grandson, Stephen. The woman remaining in the passenger seat was his wife of forty-six years, Lily. Lily did not know that Patrick had been married once before, in secret, or so he believed, and had another daughter from that marriage who was living only a few miles from here. Patrick would be surprised to hear of this. He had forgotten about the girl, now woman, long ago. Leonora could easily intervene, and even provide detailed directions to the long-lost daughter's house. Maybe she should tell Lily? It was tempting.

"The green jeep. Tennessee plates 339-AJX.” The man was Harbin Ellston, 29. The boy was Jasper, 7. The dog was Willie. They'd come a long way. Last scanned in Oklahoma. Arkansas before that. Been on the rode for a while. Willie was a shaggy mutt of the large and friendly variety. He trotted past Leonora and gave her a glance before disappearing behind some trees to quietly do his business. On returning he stopped to nuzzle her palm. Instantly she liked him and his big brown eyes. He was wearing a collar from which a sort of pouch was hanging. She wanted to know what was in it, but the boy was already approaching so she didn't have the chance.

"His name's Willie,” the boy said. "I'm Jasper."

"My name's Leonora,” she smiled at him. "I like Willie very much. He seems like a very special dog."

"He's been with me all my life,” Jasper said, now standing beside the dog. She noted the father checking on his location before going into the cement block structure that housed the vending machines. 'If I was a man', Leonora thought, 'he wouldn't leave his child alone with me', and then she knew that the man was feeling guilty. The boy didn't have a mother. They were always on the lookout for one. The mom might be alive, although she must have changed her name. Records about her had discontinued a few years earlier, when she'd moved to Houston. Vanished after that. Nothing scanned. Leonora couldn't pick up a trace. 'Even if I could', she realized, 'it wouldn't do any good. That woman's gone for a reason. She doesn't want to get found. She'd know where they are, for sure. Boy and the father hadn't moved, been in the same house all along back home in Maryville. Father worked at the local high school. Teacher. Must be on leave or something. Maybe had a clue about the mom. Leonora wanted to know and almost started to ask, but the father came back to the car with a couple of cans of soda, gave a whistle, and the boy and the dog ran off to join him. Just as they got settled and he pulled out, the old man and his wife left also.

'Guess it'll be somebody else', she thought with a shrug. 'No worries', and got up to stretch her legs.

Eighteen

As they were walking back to Zoey's car, Kandhi suddenly announced,

"She's going to Nebraska."

"Why?" Zoey asked.

"She thinks she's going to find some Argentine soccer players there, at its 'next drop-off point',” Kandhi shrugged. "Seriously."

Kandhi pulled out the keys and was about to get into the driver's side when she changed her mind. She opened the door, put the keys down on the seat and said,

"I changed my mind. You go on home now. Before we get too far. It's for the best,” and started to walk way.

"Wait!" Zoey called out after her. "I don't understand. I thought you needed my help."

"I changed my mind,” Kandhi shouted back without turning around. "Just don't mess with your socialnet page, okay? And we'll pay you for an extra week. I'll be in touch,” and with that she was gone back into the restaurant. Zoey stood by the passenger door for several moments without moving. She was still dazed from the lack of sleep, confused from the turn of events, and now even more stunned by Kandhi's sudden departure.

"Breathe,” she told herself. "Just breathe,” and as she breathed, she began to feel a little more in control once again. She was more than six hundred miles from home. "I'll never make it tonight,” she thought, and then it occurred to her that she didn't have to. She could find a place to spend the night and hit the road again in the morning. Walking around to the other side of the car, she looked up and noticed there was a motel right across the other side of the parking lot.

"I don't care,” she said to herself, "I don't care if it's the crappiest place in the world. I've had it.” She went straight over to the motel, checked herself in, went right to her room, took a long hot shower and fell asleep the moment she hit the bed.

Kandhi, in the meantime, was on the sidewalk on the phone with Chris.

"This is totally fucked up,” she was saying a bit too loudly, but looking around she saw that no one was anywhere nearby. She started walking up the street toward a Soft-E-Freeze.

"There's something you're not telling me,” she accused him before he had a chance to answer.

"You'd better fill me in,” he gently prodded. Back in the San Francisco office, Chris was relaxing with his feet on his desk and a Thai iced tea that one of the Ops people brought him. Being point-man for one of the most secretive companies in the universe was a relatively easy job. Chris spent most of his time on the phone, denying speculations. The social-rags were always trying to guess at W.W.A.'s latest gizmos. He had nothing to tell them. He could only deny, deny and deny.

"I"m guessing it went into playback mode while in transit,” she informed him. "Your stupid geniuses programmed it to bond with its container. It took the fucking idea literally. Why shouldn't it? It's a machine. What does it know about ambivalent English terminology? You meant 'person' but wrote 'container'. Now it's captured that as well. It's not thinking outside the box! It's thinking it IS a box!"

"I have no idea what you're talking about,” Chris calmly replied. "Where is the device now? Do you have it?"

"No I don't fucking have it,” she shouted. "Some idiot OPENED the stupid box. Now she's the container! It's using her to get around. Probably capturing her too, AND playing back Zoey Bridges, and being the stupid package as well. This young woman has no idea what has hit her. But there's something else. I know it. It's not just playing back. It's doing stuff. It's posting on Zoey's socialnet and if it can do ‘PUT’ then it can do ‘GET’. What the fuck did your people put in it?"

"I'll have to check on that,” Chris told her. "Tom was working on it but I know he passed some on to Mike as well."

"Mike Griggs?" Zoey gasped. "He brought Griggsy in on it?"

"Yep,” said Chris, "something about 'bonus features' if I remember rightly."

"BONUS FEATURES?" Kandhi was incensed. "You're not allowed to do that! Not until Testing says OK! Nothing that's not in the spec! This is fucking experimental shit. You know that! Oh for fuck's sake."

"Take it easy, K,” Chris advised, "It's not really your headache you know."

"It's my case,” she replied.

"You want off? You got off,” he told her. "I can bring Ginger in if we need to."

"Oh no, you don't,” she shouted, "You keep her out of my way."

"Breathe,” Chris recommended. "Come on, Kandhi, let's work it out. What's our goal here?"

"Get the fucking thing back,” she snapped. "Now I wish that warehouse geek HAD really gone and smashed it like he wanted."

"Once again, you're not making sense,” said Chris after another sip. It was rather amazing how good the stuff tasted, like a dessert.

"It's on the road,” Kandhi explained. "Don't know exactly where of course. Directional fuzzing and no GPS, right? Like our little motto? 'We do tracking. We don't do tracked'. All I know is that it thinks it needs to go to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Don't ask me why but I'm thinking it must have got some kind of overdose of sports talk somewhere along the line."

"Sports talk,” Chris repeated. "Are you all right? You don't sound well."

"I haven't slept,” she admitted, "but I'm okay. I know what I'm doing. I'm on the trail and I'm going to get it back. Just find out what Griggsy stuck in there. I really need to know,” and with that she hung up.

"I'm going to need another rental,” she realized, and while she had a chocolate raspberry softee swirl she made some calls and got a hold of the sedan she wanted in the first place. The car company even came and picked her up right there on the side of the road. Getting behind the wheel she calculated she could make it to Colorado Springs by nightfall, then dinner and a place to sleep a few hours. She was fired up now. Just the idea of them calling in Ginger! No way!

Nineteen

Kandhi was headed north, but didn't get too far before she had an idea.

"Hey You,” she said aloud, although it wasn't necessary, "try a scan in this corridor for all photo and video streams, looking for a facial recognition match on our little miss Leonora Wells."

It took just a minute or so, and then the You came up with a green check mark.

"Leonora sighting, eh?" Kandhi said. "Very nice. Getting off the bus. And not getting back on, eh? So, where is it? Rest stop. Trinidad, Colorado. Checking the map ... very good, right on the route. We'll check it out in person."

"Next drop-off point,” she added, mimicking the last post on Zoey's socialnet. It was about a four hour drive that took her only three. By the time she pulled into the rest area, she was in need of a rest herself, but after a thorough search of the place she realized she had arrived too late.

"Five o'clock or so now,” she muttered, "and the capture occurred around one fifteen. Closing in, though. We're closing in.”

She said this last bit to encourage herself, but she wasn't fooling anyone. There had been no further post so she had no idea where Leonora actually was. If she was still on track towards Grand Island, Nebraska, she might be only a hundred or two miles or so up ahead. 'If she rides all night, we could lose a lot of ground', Kandhi thought with a shrug. She knew that she couldn't do that. 'If only that Zoey hadn't been such a loser', she complained. 'I sure know how to pick 'em I guess'.

She checked with her You and found a Mega Giant Super Store not far away. There she picked up a new carry-on that fit the latest airline dimensions, a few days’ worth of clothes, a toothbrush and some other sundries she was missing from the old carry-on. Next she headed up the road a few miles and found a dive astoundingly named the Nitey Nite Moo-tel, which had a logo of a pajama-wearing cow. 'Any port in a storm', she thought. She literally could not drive another inch.

'I need to eat', she reminded herself, but she needed a bath more, and after that, another phone call.

"Hello Kandhi,” Chris replied when she reached him. "I hope you're taking a break. You know it's nothing that can't wait."

"Well, I don't know that for sure,” Kandhi retorted, "but I can only do so much. I've got to sleep, so, yes, I'm going to do that and hope she doesn't get too far ahead."

"You're tracking her, right?" Chris asked, "and if she gets too far, you can always fly."

"I guess you're right,” she agreed, "but I think I came close today. I found her scanned and got there just a couple of hours too late."

"Good, good,” said Chris. "I have to ask, though, about your theory."

"My theory?"

"Your ‘conscious package’ notion,” he reminded her. "How are you so sure about that?"

"It fits,” she said. "Look, I found it had hacked the computer at the first drop off, changing itself from Air to Ground. Then it took itself offline down there in Arizona, and every post it makes to Zoey's socialnet is exactly like a shipment tracking log entry. Source, Destination, Start time, Estimated Arrival time, even its same unique bar code id is entered every time. It's been consistent since day one, so there's no way that Leonora is doing it. The thing is reaching out, it's self-scanning. I don't know how else to put it. It seems intent on transit. I think it's using this young woman as a sort of personal delivery system, but I'm not sure that it's happy about it."

"Happy? An odd way to put it,” Chris interjected.

"Before, it was always arriving on time. Now, it's not meeting its goal. If it's as serious as I think it is, well, I don't know what it will do."

"You're losing me again,” Chris said.

"What I need to know,” Kandhi replied, "Is what you put in that thing? Is it a UPD? Is it all of it? The specs only had it for the new capture/replay but it's obviously got more than that - so what did Griggsy put in there?"

"Well,” Chris began reluctantly, "I found out a couple of things. First, well, you know, it's got some Partial Binding. That's how it reaches out. It can inject the host with thoughts."

"I figured that much,” Kandhi sighed. "What else?"

"Something he calls The Curiosity Factor,” Chris continued, "a new bonus feature."

"Untested of course,” Kandhi said.

"Unit tested,” Chris countered, causing Kandhi to snort.

"As if that means anything,” she nearly shouted. "Developers tooting their own horn, that's all that is."

"Well, never mind about that,” Chris replied. "This Factor is supposed to make it interested in new things, but there's no telling how interested or in what things. Mike says he only allowed for two entries in its curiosity map."

“Sports and boxes,” Kandhi instantly thought, but didn't say aloud. "The first two things it became aware of."

"And that's it?" she asked. "There's nothing else? Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure,” Chris hedged.

"It's something at least,” she replied. "Well, I've had it. I can't stay awake another minute. Leave me a note if you find out anything else, okay?"

"Okay,” Chris promised, "We'll keep in touch. Now get some rest. You've been pushing yourself too hard."

"Bye,” she replied, and hung up the phone. On the other end, Ginger had been standing next to Chris the entire time. She nodded and said,

"So you didn't tell her about the Mind Control Plugin?"

"It seemed enough info for now,” Chris replied.

Twenty

Leonora knew she would know when she knew, and she did, the minute that old gray beater pulled into the lot. From the license plate she knew that the driver lived in Grand Island, Nebraska, her next stop, but that wasn't all. The driver, a woman named Sarah Watson, had been driving a long way, all day long. She had stopped for gas twice, the first time around five in the morning, and the second time also for lunch. Leonora was already walking towards her when she wearily climbed out of the car, followed by her livelier nine year old daughter.

"Excuse me,” Leonora said upon approaching, "I don't mean to bother you, but I'm looking for a ride, and I don't mind driving either."

"Oh?" Sarah asked, looking suspiciously up at her. She was maybe a foot shorter than Leonora, only inches taller than her daughter, and was always cautious around strangers in general.

"Where are you headed?" she asked.

"Grand Island, Nebraska,” Leonora announced with confidence. She knew this was going to resonate with the lady.

"Really?" Sarah was surprised. "You live there?"

"It's my next stop,” Leonora answered definitively.

"We're just stopping to use the rest rooms,” Sarah told her, "and I need some more coffee. We've been on the road all day."

"Where are you going?” Leonora questioned her, although she already knew the answer.

"Grand Island, just so happens,” Sarah answered after a pause. Her daughter stood beside her protectively, just in case she was needed. Both were in a hurry to use the potty.

"Don't let me hold you up,” Leonora said gently. "I can see your daughter needs to go."

"Okay,” Sarah replied, and they started to move away, when Leonora added,

"But you might not want to get that coffee. I don't mind driving like I said, and you sure look like you could use some sleep."

Sarah nodded and the two went off to the cement block building. Leonora waited by the car, feeling certain she would get the 'ride'. When the two returned, Sarah agreed. She was exhausted.

"We've been driving from Tucson,” she told Leonora as she got into the passenger seat, and her daughter got in back. "Five hundred miles so far today, and another four hundred to go. I was hoping to be home by midnight."

"We might just make it,” Leonora said, taking the keys and adjusting her seat. "Or within an hour or so I would guess."

She pulled the car out of the lot and drove it back onto the highway. Sarah relaxed and even lowered her seat.

"I haven't slept much lately,” she said as she nodded off.

"I know what that's like,” Leonora said with a smile, not giving away that she herself hadn't slept in more than forty hours. She didn't feel tired at all. Everything seemed so vivid to her and she had so much to think about it was hard to remember a time when she didn't like to think at all, like the day before yesterday, and every day before that for years and years and years.

"What's your name?” said a voice from the back seat. Leonora hadn't realized they had all failed to introduce themselves!

"Leonora,” she said, glancing in the rear view mirror at the girl in the back seat. The girl had very short, very dark hair cut in bangs, wore pink-framed glasses, pink lipstick, and wore a pink sweater.

"What's yours?" Leonora asked.

"Saya,” the girl replied. "My mom's Sarah."

"Sarah and Saya,” Leonora nodded, "very pretty names."

"How old are you, Saya?" she asked, although she knew exactly how old she was. She had a sense that it would be safer not to reveal how much she knew.

"I'm nine,” Saya told her. "My mom is thirty-one. How old are you?"

"Twenty three,” Leonora told her.

"I like your hair”, the girl said.

"Dye job,” Leonora confessed. "Glad you like it."

"I would like to be blond too sometimes,” Saya confided. "My mom won't let me, though. Says it looks stupid on an Asian girl."

"So what are you? Chinese?"

"We're Japanese,” Saya said. "Me and my mom, that is. Not my dad. I’ve only seen pictures of him."

"Why is that?"

"He died before I was born,” Saya said quietly.

"I'm sorry to hear it,” Leonora told her. "Me, I never knew my mom."

"Did she die too?"

"I don't really know,” Leonora said. "My dad won't talk about her. Never would."

"At least you have your dad,” Saya said.

"Sort of,” Leonora replied. "I don't see him much since he went to prison."

"Prison?" Saya gasped. "What did he do?"

"Killed somebody,” Leonora calmly announced.

"Wow,” Saya was impressed. "What did he do that for?"

"Well,” Leonora began, "He says he did it because that man was about to kill a whole bunch of innocent people, and he didn't want it to happen. Says he'd do it again in a heartbeat."

She paused, and as there was no response from the girl in the back, she continued.

"Just too bad for him the man he killed was a general, and it was during the war."

"This war?" Saya asked.

"Yup. This one,” Leonora replied. They didn't have to say any more about that. This war had been going on for years. It was pretty much a whole bunch of wars all wrapped up into one continuous one. Didn't make any difference mentioning which battlefield, which country, which continent her dad had served in. It might have been anywhere. It had gotten to the point where the generals were so desperate they were always planning to wipe out entire towns just to stop the random bombs and mayhem.

"My dad died in this war too,” Saya said. "He was out there when I was born but he never made it back."

"It's a damn shame,” Leonora clucked, shaking her head. "I'll never understand it."

The pair grew quiet for several minutes. Night had already begun to fall as they approached the outskirts of Colorado Springs. Still a long way to go, Leonora figured, but she was happy to be on the road again, and under her own power. She was never much of a driver - couldn't afford it, to tell the truth - but she did enjoy it every chance she got. She thought the girl might fall asleep back there. The mom was snoring away up front, but Saya soon piped up again.

"We went to see my grandma,” she told Leonora. "My mom's mom. She just died too but at least she was sixty."

Sixty?" Leonora asked, "That's not very old. That's too young to die."

"She got sick,” Saya said. "Then she died. I didn't know her very much. The last time I saw her, when she was alive that is, she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I was only seven. How should I know?"

"What did you tell her,” Leonora laughed.

"I said I wanted to help animals,” Saya replied.

"That's very nice,” Leonora complimented her. "That's a good idea you have there."

"Do you want to help animals too?” Saya wanted to know.

"Well, not really, I guess,” Leonora said. "Never thought about it, you know. Seems to me like animals know pretty much how to take care of themselves. Not like a lot of people do."

"You might be right,” Saya sighed, and sat back. Then she asked,

"What do you do?"

Leonora did not quite know how to answer that. She thought for a moment, and then said,

"Well, I do have a job. Or at least I did have a job. Maybe I still do. I don't know. I kind of left it behind yesterday. I don't know if I'm going back or not. I was working in a warehouse. Not much of a job."

"What do you want to do?” the girl persisted, and Leonora didn't have an answer.

"Beats me,” she said. "All I ever wanted to do ... well, let's just say I don't want to do all that anymore. I guess I'll know when I find it. How about that?"

"That's okay,” Saya agreed. "Maybe I will too."

"So, why are you going to Grand Island?" Saya asked. "You told my mom it was your next stop. What does that mean?"

"Going to see River Plate,” Leonora said.

"You mean the Platte?" said Saya.

"Isn't it Plate?" Leonora asked.

"It's Platte,” Saya told her, "but it is a river. What's so special about it?"

"I guess I don't really know,” Leonora murmured, and truly she didn’t. It was an idea that had popped into her mind and she hadn't bothered to question it. Maybe there's been some mistake, she considered, but soon decided it didn't really matter. There had to be a next stop anyway, so one place was probably as good as any, as long as it was on the way. And it was on the way to Green Bay, although now that she thought of that, she couldn't remember why she wanted to go to that place either.

"Never mind,” she said out loud.

"First things first,” she added, and she had no idea what she meant by that.

She fell silent after that, and Saya eventually did fall asleep. The mother and daughter looked so peaceful that Leonora didn't want to wake them up, so she made no stops but drove the rest of the trip straight on through. It was nearly midnight when they approached the outskirts of Grand Island, Nebraska. A map in her head told her exactly which way to go to get to their house, and she started to do that before remembering that she wasn't supposed to know their address, and it would probably seem very strange to them if she did. So she woke Sarah up and followed the directions she was given. Soon they were at the Watson's small house in a quiet little neighborhood near the river.

"I guess here we are,” Leonora said, pulling into the driveway.

"Thanks so much,” Sarah said quietly. Saya was stretched out on the back seat, fast asleep. "I don't know how I would have made it. I was totally wiped out."

"I could tell,” Leonora smiled. "It was my pleasure, really."

"Don't you have somewhere to go?" Sarah asked. "I could drive you there now."

"Actually, I don't,” Leonora admitted. "I didn't really think that far."

"Well, you spend the night here with us then,” Sarah said, and Leonora did not protest, but volunteered to carry the sleeping child into the house. As she placed the girl on her bed and came back into the living room, she saw that Sarah was already setting up a place for her to sleep on the sofa-bed there. Suddenly, Leonora felt the need for sleep come over her, and she sank down onto the couch and passed out even before her head hit the pillow.

Twenty One

When Leonora woke up in the morning, everything seemed strange. It took her a few moments to even remember where she was, and how she got there. It had been so late at night, and she had been so tired, that she hadn't had a good look at the place and now that she did, she felt a little sad. She could hear that Sarah and Saya were in the kitchen, talking quietly, probably so as not to disturb her. She could hear the sound of their voices but could not make out the words. It didn't matter. The two were a family in their own little home. Everything about the living room also said 'home', from the child-made drawings displayed proudly on the walls, to the collection of pony paraphernalia strewn about the place. The photos on top of the small, old TV were all of Saya at various ages with no trace of any parents.

Saya's talk of her missing father had stirred up a bunch of emotions that Leonora did not want to deal with, from thoughts of her long-lost mother to memories of her father, whom she hadn't visited in months and felt guilty about. It occurred to her that with her new brain, as she referred to it, she might be able to track her mother down somehow. Facts like those seemed to be coming unbidden to her mind but in this case there was nothing. She squeezed her eyes shut together and wished, but no data at all arrived. This too was odd. Over the past two days she had felt a constant stream of something flowing through her and now there was radio silence on that frequency.

She knew the polite thing to do would be to go into the kitchen and thank Sarah and Saya for their hospitality, but she was afraid they would offer her something they clearly could not afford to. Taking a deep breath, she got up from the couch as silently as she could, tip-toed to the front door, slowly opened it with a sense of relief when it didn't squeak, and then hurried outside and up the street. She recalled that the house was not far from the river, the river she had apparently come to see for no apparent reason. She walked towards it, seeing the map clearly in her mind. For a large river, it was a disappointment, just a bunch of water as far as she could tell. Why she had expected it to be more, she couldn't say.

There was a bench beside a jogging path so she sat down and stared across at the other bank. She usually enjoyed this kind of thing. She would sit back, smoke a jay, enjoy the sunshine and the wide open space, but now there was a subtle difference. She wasn't quite the same person anymore. Where before she had no qualms, no doubts, no goals, no obstacles, where she had been free and easy and almost always happy, almost always laughing, now she felt incomplete, that she couldn't rest without a plan. A plan. She almost laughed now at the thought. When had she ever wanted or needed a plan? What was the point of that? You go on, you do your thing, que sera sera and all of that.

'First things first', she thought. 'A plan, beginning with the end in mind. What are we trying to accomplish here? If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably wind up somewhere else. Expected results, and then define the steps, and then you take it one thing at a time, with first things first.'

It seemed pretty obvious. This is how one should proceed with any endeavor. But she had no end in mind. She wasn't trying to accomplish anything. What was it that Saya had asked her? What do you want to do with your life? And she had no answer to that one. What was it that had brought her here? She thought she had had a plan. Something about Green Bay, and then Grand Island in between. One step at a time, wasn't that it? So how do we get to Green Bay from here? And why are we going to Green Bay? And who is "we" and why am I thinking this way?

Green Bay was gone. It wasn't even a notion anymore. It meant nothing. That goal, whatever it meant, no longer was. Then what was 'the end' now? Well, she thought, if I don't know what the big picture is, maybe I can do a smaller one, like breakfast. That could be the goal for now, and the next step is to decide where to go and what to have. The step after that? Go there and have that! She could see, a few blocks down along the river, the unmistakable towering logo of a Burger Joint. As good a place as any, she decided, and she got up and headed that way.

Twenty Two

Ginger MacAvoy had a nice view from her corner window office on the fourth floor of the historical San Francisco edifice that housed the headquarters of World Weary Avengers, Incorporated. She shared that level with most of the company’s executives and software developers. The CTO had a room in the building's basement and most of the testers where housed down there as well. It wasn't the best arrangement, morale-wise, but as Chief Security Officer, that was none of her concern. Her business was secrecy, privacy, and intellectual property. Ginger's be-freckled golden skin, which matched the golden hair that she kept tied up tight in a bun, along with her aviator sunglasses and bright pink lip gloss, masked the harsh interior life of the tireless watchdog. World Weary Avengers could not afford any lapses; they were the owners of some extremely advanced and therefore dangerous technology. Spies were always sniffing around, spying and prying and trying to break in. It was useful to be paranoid in her position, and to trust no one.

One person she especially didn't trust was Kandhi Clarke. She didn't trust her and she didn't like her and she didn't approve of her existence, for that matter, and Kandhi knew it. Ginger was always trying to push her aside and keep her in the dark. Their loathing of each other was not merely mutual, it was severe and genuine. If Ginger had her way, there would be no quality assurance at all. She wasn't interested in whether their technology worked or not, only that it was never discovered by anyone from the outside world. The developers, all five of them, were under contracts so stringent they could probably not afford to ever leave. Ginger watched their every move. There was nothing she didn't know about them, and nothing she admired much either.

The problem with mind control, she had immediately realized, is the problem of 'who controls the controller?' It was one of those dilemmas of recursions, like 'who created God'? If a device was capable of mind control, it had to be programmed, so the programmer could control it. It had to be operated, so the operator could control it. Any one with a second device could control a person with the first, and so on, and on to infinity. She was not concerned with the ethics. It was rather an impressive achievement, to be able to place specific thoughts into someone else's mind in their own voice, such that it was indistinguishable from their own self-generated ideas. To be able to enter those words into a device and transmit those thoughts into a specific target. That was version one. Version two had introduced the partial binding, whereby the device and the host's mind could inter-operate without the bother of typing or talking or displaying images on a screen. Version three had introduced trans-volitional search, whereby the device would immediately seek and discover throughout the connected universe whatever topics had entered the host's little mind.

The partial bind had led to a state of dependence which Ginger thought was simply deplorable. She had experienced the bind and had rejected it after a time. Now she relied only on her own direct contact with the central hub, the main server within the company that could perform the same activities but with a layer of personal filtering in between - unobtrusive, in other words. She sat now at her desk and conveyed her desires to the mainframe. She was tracking Kandhi's UPD. She had opened a special secret channel into it and could now monitor and control its activity directly. She was disgusted to see that Kandhi, now driving through western Nebraska, was merely searching the public photo and video streams for facial recognition matches of Leonora Wells. Why not use the NatSurv? Ever since the war began, the national surveillance program had become quite extensive. Although it was supposed to be highly confidential and felonious to breach, the people at W.W.A. were light years ahead with un-detectable methods and didn't even concern themselves with being discovered. Even if they were, they had certain contracts that could not be ignored and would have given them a free ride anyway.

The NatSurv quickly provided Ginger with information that Kandhi could have used the night before - Leonora entering Sarah Watson's car and driving it out of the Trinidad rest area. That same car was tracked at several locations along the highways, all the way into Grand Island, Nebraska. It was last spotted at the exit they took, and it was a no-brainer to conclude the car had traveled to the Watson's home not two miles away from there. Scanning that neighborhood's watch cameras for the remainder of the night was fruitless. Certainly they had slept after that long drive. Ginger panned out to within a few miles of the residence, and scanned the rest of the morning's activity. Sure enough, she easily located Leonora Wells sitting with a breakfast sandwich at the Riverside Burger Joint at ten-fifteen in the morning, not a half an hour before.

Ginger instructed Kandhi's You to provide that data to Kandhi, who was surprised and excited to receive it. She was less than twenty miles away and stepped on it. Unfortunately, by the time she arrived, Leonora was gone again. Kandhi was hungry, though, so she ordered a burger and a soda, and sat down at a table outside to enjoy her lunch.

'Worthless', muttered Ginger at the controls in San Francisco. 'Eating that crap. No wonder', she said to herself. The NatSurv had no further information on Leonora just yet. One of its weaknesses was its delay factor. The government, as always, used outdated equipment and the least sophisticated software it could find. While she was certain she would soon acquire imagery of Leonora's next movements, she called Mike Griggs into her office. The scruffy engineer - no older than thirty but as dirty and smelly as any old street bum - worked seventeen hours a day and dreamed about work during the rest.

'Project Personality?' he asked, entering her office. She held up her hand to back him away from the door. She didn't want him stinking up the place, and he knew better, so he stood just outside in the hallway, as she said,

"Fuck that. It's past all that. Now it's just a matter of getting the thing back."

"Did you find the girl?" he asked.

"I only care about the box,” she snapped. "The girl's just a carrier. If we can get to it, talk to it. Can we do that?"

"You mean like open a channel?"

"Whatever you want to call it,” she told him. "Can we reach it?"

"Not from a distance,” Griggsy said. "It's totally masked out. We do tracking, you know. We don't do tracked.'

'I know my own words', Ginger cracked. 'Answer the question. You said 'not from a distance'. Does that mean from closer we can?'

'If we're in range', he said, 'we might get to it on the radio.'

'Radio? Over the air and in the clear?'

'Possibly', Mike considered. Like a walkie-talkie, you know? Scan the frequency but it's such a narrow band and such a low range, you would have to be pretty close.'

'How close? A yard? A mile?'

'A mile might be close enough', he said. 'Go A.M. scanner and look for its signature. It's embedded in the serial number. I'll send you the decode.'

'Fine', she said, and waved him away. A minute or so later she received the data and forwarded it to Kandhi's You, with commands to begin the sweep and report on contact. Privately, she was muttering to herself,

'Move, you lazy slob! Get off your ass and drive around', and then she remembered she had root control of the You. She could invoke its Mind Control Plugin and tell Kandhi to do just that. So she did. Kandhi thought it was her own idea to start driving around the neighborhood. Her You didn't tell her otherwise. It was under filtered forwarding, only giving Kandhi what Ginger permitted it to. To Kandhi, the surveillance seemed utterly useless. She drove around in meandering random patterns throughout the city for more than an hour, and got nothing. She received no sign of Leonora either in person or through her UPD. She was not even informed when her You found the Nupie on the local air band, and transmitted Ginger's message to it. The message was fairly simple. Ginger merely told the renegade device to return to the Riverside Burger Joint, wait there for Kandhi Clarke, and surrender itself to her.

Twenty Three

Leonora had been wandering aimlessly around town, and not happily, but it wasn't until she found herself directed back towards the Burger Joint that she really began to wonder about it. All of the questions she'd had earlier that morning returned to her mind with a vengeance. She seemed to be of two minds. At least two. One mind had decided to go back but couldn't say why. Another mind kept making itself up to stay right where she was until she understood everything. Yet another was satisfied to at least be pointed in some direction. From the outside, she looked like a slapstick comedy routine, lurching this way and that, stopping and starting, turning around. Her act caught the attention of a driver of a delivery van passing by, who pulled over to the curb beside her. Leonora looked over to see the broad smiling face of the driver, who said,

"Hello?"

"Hi,” Leonora sheepishly replied, suddenly becoming self-conscious.

"Going somewhere?" the driver asked, and this time Leonora burst out laughing.

"Could be,” she replied, "if I could figure out where that was."

"Well, hop on in and I'll take you wherever,” the driver suggested, and Leonora considered it. The van was a fairly old model, originally a dark brown that had been unsuccessfully painted over with a lighter shade of mud. Across the side a poor stencil job in blood red proclaimed "Double Dee-liveries.” Something about the vehicle appealed to her, as well as the driver, a short, thick dark woman who later introduced herself as Ruby. The kicker for Leonora was a golden retriever who popped its head out of the back of the van and gave her the friendliest drooly grin. Leonora hopped on board and gave the dog a good scratching behind the ears.

"I could use some help,” Ruby told her as they drove away. "If you don't mind a little labor. I can pay you. It's just this delivery I have to make. Kind of large and little awkward. Ledge here ain't no help with it. Course she's only a dog."

"What was that name?"

"Ledge,” Ruby laughed. "I call her that because she's always perching on places too small for her. Never falls off, though. Don't know how she does it."

"Sure I'll help,” Leonora asked the earlier question. "I'd be glad to."

It felt good to be moving with a purpose, actually going somewhere for a reason. Even the little black box that was nested against her belly seemed to hum with its own sense of vigor again. The job itself was a bit of a pain. Leonora couldn't guess, and Ruby couldn't tell her, exactly what was in the large, oddly shaped crate, but it took four hands and two backs to maneuver it out of the truck and into the garage of the grateful recipient, who gave them each an extra cash bonus as he rubbed his hands together with unseemly delight. They were glad to get away from there.

"That was it,” Ruby told her. "I came all this way for that. Now I guess I'll be heading home, after I take you wherever you want to go."

"Where's home?" Leonora asked, stalling. She was hoping that Ruby's answer would give her an idea of some destination.

"Oh, a little old place nobody ever seems to have heard of,” Ruby said, "town called Wetford, Arizona."

"Wetford!" Leonora gasped. "You're kidding me, right? How did you know what's where I live?"

"You do?" Ruby was surprised. "No way. What part of the town are you from?"

"Not from there originally,” Leonora told her, "but I live right down by the abandoned train station. Work around there too at a warehouse called Ledman Storage and Pickup."

"Ledman Pickup?" Ruby laughed. "You work there? Oh my gosh, that place is a legend! How long have you been in there?"

"About a month,” Leonora admitted.

"Well no wonder,” Ruby replied. "Any longer and we would've met before this. My boss goes down there often enough. The place is a regular treasure trove for us. We get a lot of business out of it."

"What do you mean?"

"What we do,” Ruby replied. "We're sort of a rescue angel service for lost deliveries. My boss, the double dee of the name, she's got a knack and a talent for finding things. What she does is find packages that go missing in transit and the other way around too, she'll find the destinations for the packages that got lost. We find the rightful owners, get in touch, offer them a range of services. If the price is right, and the urgency too, then I'll take it myself. I go around most of the west and southwest on special cases. Otherwise we mostly use other shippers and pocket the profit. Ledman Pickup, man, that place is a graveyard for boxes and stuff. She's always finding things there, hiding under those shelves, stuck in those corners. Junior and Rolando, you know those guys, right?"

"Course I do"

"They don't give a shit,” Ruby said, "They'll let us take whatever we find. Hell, they're mostly the reason things get lost in the first place. Them and the idiot supervisors they always seem to get."

"I'm the idiot supervisor now,” Leonora admitted with a smile.

"Sorry,” Ruby said, "no offense. Nothing personal, you know, seeing as we never met or I never would have said so."

"Oh, you would have!" Leonora told her. "It's exactly what I was. The idiot supervisor! I didn't give a shit either. Now, I don't know why, but now I feel different. Can I go back with you?"

"Sure thing,” Ruby said, "glad to have the company. If you're going where I'm going, it sure makes it easier! Hungry, though? I'm kind of hungry. Saw a Burger Joint on the way to the highway."

"Oh, God,” Leonora told her, "Anywhere but there"

"All right,” Ruby agreed. "Anywhere else it is"

Twenty Four

Kandhi was still sitting at a table in the Burger Joint when the ugly brown van rolled by. She glanced up at it, thought, 'hey, that looks like Leonora Wells sitting in there', before returning her attention to the pink lemonade she was lingering over. A few sips went by and then she thought, 'why am I sitting here when Leonora Wells just went driving by', and that thought was quickly answered in her brain by the idea, 'it couldn't be. She's coming back here.'

“Oh”, she said to herself, and returned to her beverage. A few more moments passed before she asked herself another question.

“Why would Leonora Wells be coming back here? She was just here and she left! Did she forget something?”

“She's supposed to be coming back here”, the little voice in her head repeated, and then Kandhi grew suspicious.

“Hey You”, she quietly murmured, “are you keeping secrets from me?”

“Um, I'm not allowed to say?” the You feebly replied.

“That does it!” Kandhi jumped up. “Frickin' Ginger MacAvoy! It's got to be. She's been sneaking around my back again. Well, I've got a surprise for you, Ginger MacAvoy. And you too, You!”

She pulled the You out of her pocket and hesitated.

“Wait a minute', she told it. 'First I want some information. About that van. Double Dee-liveries. Arizona plates. 006-DDX. Thanks. Got it. 4226 Hanson Avenue, Wetford Arizona. Wetford, Arizona? Holy!” and with that exclamation, she poked a bent paper clip into a teensy hole in the side of the universal personal device, and turned it off.

“So much for you, You!” she declared as she set foot on the sidewalk outside. “And you too, Ginger MacAvoy”, she added.

Kandhi made straight for her car and decided she could do the nine hundred miles or so by morning.

“What's the difference?” she thought. “It's all I have been doing lately anyway. But this time, no frickin' You to be spying on me. It's all just me. Me and the radio for a change.”

It actually felt good to go without that stream of constant data, that instant information, that knowing of whatever she wanted to know at a moment's notice. She didn't have to have a thought in her head, just the wide open road, the plains, the mountains, whatever there was out the window.

“I should do this more often”, she told herself as she made it through western Nebraska, into Colorado, down towards Arizona, and all the way, straight as she could, to the very place she'd started out just a couple of long days before.

Twenty Five

It was five in the morning and Leonora Wells was still awake. She had slept a lot during the long ride south with Ruby. They switched the watch, four hours apiece, waking and driving, or sitting and dozing. They chatted a little in between, enough to know they were getting along fine. Ledge sat on the knees of whichever of the two was in the passenger seat, and mostly slept as well. The drive seemed to go fast, and then she was home, in the middle of the night, standing in the living room and marveling at the cleanliness of her apartment. It was like elves had come and done it for her.

“It's a new world”, Leonora declared with a smile. She had pretty much guaranteed herself a new job with Double Dee-liveries. All she had to do was show up in a few hours and introduce herself to the boss, Ruby's girlfriend, Dawn Debris. After that, she'd start right in, finding homes for lost packages. It just felt so right. There was such a need, and she had just what it took. She was sure of it. There would be destinations. There would be steps. There'd be process and order and she would be in control. Nice and tidy. And doing a public service too. What could be wrong?

There came a knock on the door. Puzzled, Leonora went over and opened it to see a puffy, pasty, pink-haired, nose- and ear- and lip-pierced woman standing on the landing.

"Leonora Wells?" the woman asked.

"That's me,” she replied. "What can I do for you?"

"My name's Kandhi Clarke,” the woman said, producing an official looking badge of some sort. "I work for W.W.A. Incorporated out of San Francisco. I believe you have something that belongs to us. I've come to claim it if you don't mind."

"If I have something of yours, you're welcome to it,” Leonora said, and stepped back, gesturing with her arm for Kandhi to come inside. "As you can see,” she continued, "I don't really have a lot of things, and I doubt that any of this stuff is what you're looking for.”

"It's something that looks like this,” Kandhi said, pulling out her universal personal device.

"Oh!” Leonora exclaimed. "You've got one of them too? What is it, anyway? I've just been lugging this thing around,” and she pulled the Nupie out of her overalls pouch and showed it to Kandhi.

"I'm sorry,” Kandhi told her, "I'm not allowed to say. It's a matter of national security.”

"Okay,” Leonora replied. "I know a thing or two about that,” and she handed it over. Kandhi grabbed it and stuffed it in her pocket.

"Would you like some tea or coffee?" Leonora asked. "You look like you could use something."

"No, no,” Kandhi said, "that's very kind but no. I've got to go. I just came for this.”

"Well, all right,” Leonora replied. She waited patiently for Kandhi to leave, still curious about the device, but not sorry to see it go.

"Does yours hum too?" she asked Kandhi, who shrugged and shook her head.

"That little thing can really sing sometimes,” Leonora went on. "Lately, though, it seemed kind of sad. I don't know. Like it was missing something it needed.”

Kandhi didn't say anything, but turned and walked out the door. Once back on the landing, though, she turned, and said,

"Can I ask you something?"

"Shoot"

"Why'd you travel all the way to hell and gone the past few days? I've been chasing you and chasing you."

"I’m sorry,” Leonora replied. "I didn't know you were. Otherwise I suppose I would've stopped. I can't tell you anyway. I don't know myself. It just seemed like the thing to do, I guess.”

"Huh,” Kandhi muttered, and then said goodbye and clattered down the metal stairs. Leonora shut the door, went back inside and made herself a cup of coffee.

Twenty Six

"I've got you now, my pretty,” Kandhi shouted at the little black box once she was safely inside her rental car. "And this time, you're not getting away."

She shoved it into the central chamber of her brand new carry-on and headed straight for the Phoenix airport. She didn't care about sleep. She didn't care about food. She had been driving and driving for so long now she felt just like a machine. Her You was still dormant and she wasn't missing the gadget one bit. She knew where she was going and she went straight there. This time it was all business. Returned the rental car without a hassle. Got through security, no sweat. Boarding pass, check. Wait for the flight, not a problem. Get to the gate, uh-oh. Trouble. National Security. Alert level raised. Apologies from the airline. No carry-ons allowed. All carry-ons must be checked at boarding. Not to worry. They will all be safely stowed below and returned upon arrival. No time to do anything about it. They were taking the carry-ons as you boarded, without warning, without time. She had to let it go.

“It'll be okay”, she told herself. “They'll take it straight to the hold and right back out again in San Francisco.”

That's what she told herself, but all throughout the flight she was worried. She nearly turned on the You again, but decided it wouldn't do any good. She didn't know about the proximity radio detector. Ginger hadn't told her about that back door contingency. It wasn't in the specs and nobody told her everything ever. How many times had she complained to Chris, to Tom. She needed to know. She needed to know every little thing. Griggsy! She'd never know what he'd put in there, what he'd done, what ridiculous, crazy, stupid, arrogant, pompous, jackass technology he'd gone right ahead and rammed into the thing's very registers, into its very fibers, into the permanent read-only fixtures of its central core.

Whatever it was, it was enough. Enough to put the notion into the head of a baggage handler that the brand new bright pink carry-on there, ostensibly marked for that very flight, was actually intended for a different airline entirely. The baggage handler felt such serious concern that he double checked the computer himself, and found it was true. The computer showed it was booked for a flight to Miami in twenty minutes time. The baggage handler hurried down the terminal hallway as fast as he could, so worried that the little carry-on would miss its flight and then be stranded there in Phoenix. Someone was going to miss it. He could make that person very happy and eternally grateful if only he just hurried it up. So he rushed. And he made it on time. And the last thing he saw was the cute little carry-on being flung into the belly of the jetliner that was destined to fly it straight into the glowing red sunset.