In the Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1995 by T.J.Hardman, Jr. HTML version of In The Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1996 by T.J.Hardman, Jr and TJH Internet SP. No part of this work may be reproduced, copied or distributed without the express handwritten permission of the author, with the exception of on-screen viewing.

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to any persons living or dead are entirely coincidental. Some use may be made herein of real locations or institutions, but such use is entirely fictional in intent. Any use of tradenames or trademarks is completely accidental, and is not to be interpreted as any attempt to disparage or recommend.

Many thanks are extended to those who have been trying to keep abreast of issues and technologies which will be examined in detail in this story.

All medical or biologic concepts herein described are, where not presently under patent or copyright protection, to be considered as either the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr, or as extant espionage tools not protected by either patent or copyright law.

All menuing systems described herein, especially motion-control menuing systems, where not already under patent or copyright protection, should be considered the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr and are not to be duplicated in any manner whatsoever without direct contractual consent. Insofar as it is implied, all due credit is to be given to the pioneers of voice-recognition systems, particularly International Business Machines (IBM). All described original inventions and modifications to extant simple technologies, or combinations of advanced extant technologies into new systems are to be considered the intellectual property of T.J. Hardman, Jr. and may not be marketed for profit without contractual arrangements.

Some of the predicted icon-based task-programming systems are conceptually similar to a display motif of a product of the University of New Mexico called 'khoros', although to my knowledge, their scientific dataprocessing and visualization system was developed completely independently of my own concepts.

Part Four

Wilson had to go through three days more testing, less intrusive, thankfully, than that of the initial day. Finally, he had three days of rest, relaxation, and observation. The two doctors in charge of whatever had been done to him were not immediately available, and so he stewed through this time, unable to ask why it was taking so long for him to get back to work.

Occasionally, in his various travels through the maze of nondescript corridors, he encountered various other persons, also under escort. Wilson gathered that these encounters were not intended to occur. Once, he and the two spooks had rounded a corner in time to see an immensely-muscled person gripping the metal frame of a doorway, trying to keep from being pushed inside by three spooks. Fast and strong as the spooks were, the person was able to simply hold fast to the doorway as they rained accurate lightning blows to his various joints. The spooks escorting Wilson bolted to aid their fellows, bounding down the interminably long hall, taking fifteen feet at a stride. Wilson himself hurried closer, but slowed as he neared the scene of this activity.

The spooks were slamming the person seriously. The two spooks who had been with Wilson began group-tackling the person, who wasn't going anywhere. The two spooks backed up, and one said something very short and clipped in their incomprehensible language, and then they both sidekicked the person's knees from behind. There was little effect, but after another very brief exchange, perhaps five syllables, they kicked again, and this time, the two spooks who had been trying to pry the person's hands from the doorframe elbowed him in the eyes at the instant that the others again kicked at his knees. He fell backwards out of the doorway, and spun into motion, but not fast enough; the normally invisible third spook of his escort blurred across the hall and slammed some sort of pressure injector, a tiny pistol-grip thing, into the soft skin of the person's neck. His eyes rolled up almost instantaneously, and he went limp a moment later. The five spooks hissed, whistled and popped for about a second, sounding like a one-second sound bite from a Fourth-of-July celebration, and then dragged the person into the room. Wilson had come up to see if he could help, and then realized why the spooks had had such a difficult time getting the person under control. His skin was as thick as an elephant's skin, and seemed to be the same sandpapery texture. As the spooks dragged him from the hall, Wilson noted that the person's head was oddly distorted, with a very heavy lower jawbone set under an strangely small skull. His lips flopped loosely, and Wilson noted that all of his front teeth seemed to be missing, and the molars were so outsized that they nearly filled the spaces left by the missing incisors. One of Wilson's escort looked up at him, and said, "It's not polite to stare, okay?", and Wilson turned away from the poor unconscious monster.

With one exception, the rest of the people he saw were either spooks, or oddly altered persons. He only glimpsed these last, the horror of their disfigurements only accentuated by the brevity of contact. One man was obviously quite mad, appearing to be rabid, in fact. He was gnashing his teeth, and foaming at the mouth, writhing furiously within his strightjacket. The spooks escorting him had him on two leash-poles, and were keeping him at a safe distance. Once Wilson glimpsed a very skinny person, who must have been all of seven feet tall, hugely expanded cranium barely clearing the ceiling. It staggered under the weight of its own head, and was led by a single spook, who led it slowly, almost reverently. Its tiny face, a bare appendage to the huge skull, was suffused with an expression of otherworldly bliss, and when it spotted Wilson and his escort, it smiled at them beatifically.

On his final day at the facility, Wilson and a single escort were walking down a long hall, and midway, a door opened, and two spooks came out, escorting a female. They headed towards Wilson and his own escort. There was something odd about her walk, a sort of unlimber clumsiness, not the normal grace that one expects of a woman. She had big feet. Wilson recalled the spook's admonition about staring, but he couldn't help himself. This graceless woman was otherwise lovely. She was about five-ten, and the loosely casual unisex hospital gown couldn't begin to conceal lush curves. As their two groups approached, the woman became conscious of Wilson's gaze, and she locked gazes with him. Pixie face, green eyes blazing with an expression that was not quite hate, combined with not-quite-accepted near-resignation, and as Wilson stared right back, she broke eye-contact, and looked at the floor as she passed. He couldn't help turning his head to follow, and she looked back at him looking at her back, and her face colored, and her lips twisted in restraint of anger, and she turned away, to march down the hall on her oddly large bare feet. Wilson wondered why she was there, in this hospital wing otherwise full of monstrosities.

They turned a corner, and Wilson, assuming that the spooks were interested in females, remarked, "Check that babe out!"

The spooks, whose expressions had remained professionally uninterested in the female, suddenly grinned at each other. One said, "You mean Bob? Yah, too bad about him. Poor guy."

Wilson was taken aback. "That was a man?

The other spook tittered inanely. "Hee hee hee... Used to be. Hee hmmph."

"Jesus," said Wilson. "How the hell?"

"Classified," said the first spook. He giggled a bit, also, and then added, "Just glad it wasn't me. Pretty little thing isn't he? I mean, she. Heheheh."

"But, but, I mean, he's really a she?"

"In every way. Right down to the genes. And what genes they are. Pretty tight fit huh?"

Wilson was highly embarrassed, and could better understand the look that Bob had given him. He blushed to the roots. "Poor Bob."

"Yup," said the second spook, and they both checked their watches, and guffawed.

Waiting again in the anteroom, Wilson stewed. He intended to give the doctors a piece of his mind, and when the two came in, he started right away. The spooks simply sat there while he had his say, wearing faces of utter contrived innocence, which suited them not at all.

"What the hell are you doing here, anyways?" said Wilson, winding up for a second howl, but the pale thin doctor waved him to silence, and somehow, Wilson found that gesture to be so powerful that his mouth shut as of its own accord.

"What we're doing here is the exact same thing as the HindAsians were doing five years ago. We had to reproduce large portions of the work from scratch, despite Dr. C's notes and expertise. See, we had to redevelop the various stocks of viruses and gene fragments that they carry. So you know, the HindAsians have infectious versions of most of these viruses... very complex strings of genetic information."

"Mutative war-virus?" Wilson was getting used to shock after shock. He took this almost in stride.

"Doesn't work that way, it's infectious, not contagious. The delivery system is nothing so simple as a small sub-filterable virus, which is what you need for a successful war-virus. No, these were designed to be used as part of an occupation."

Dr. C broke in: "You see, the demagogues who now rule my people fully believe in the central tenet of a schismatic cult. This is best translated by saying that they consider all non-believers to be animals. My work on plasmid transport and subsequent incorporation and backwards destructuring concurrent with forward restructuring was subverted to the evil end of actually making non-believers into animals, so that the faithful could not be tempted into sinful sexual liasons with non-believers. Before you ask, non-believers cannot ever be converted into believers. One must be born a Hindu, and then one may convert to the schism." Dr. C produced a plastic cylinder, and unscrewed one end. He shook out what appeared to be a nearly-transparent piece of optical-fiber. "The delivery system. This is an outgrowth of a technology developed in the mid-1990's. It is basically a hardened extruded complex poly-sucrose shell. Essentially, it is a thick piece of hardened hollow cotton candy. Inside this stiff coating," (and here Dr. C jabbed himself in the fleshy part of his arm. The tip sank easily into the flesh, and was followed by the entire shaft. It left no mark. It was perhaps half the diameter of a fine hypodermic needle) "there would be contained a very long strand of ribonucleaic acid, to which would be bound the plasmid-transfer viruses and the DNA which effects the intended changes. In brief, this is an immense man-made retrovirus containing a great deal of information. I will not go into the details, as the technology is very complex, but suffice it to say, very great changes can be produced."

"Yah, I've seen some of your changes. Mostly monstrosities, huh? Is that what the HindAsians have in store for us? I say, nuke 'em!"

The pale thin doctor broke in, saying, "Actually, we'd have loved to do that. Unfortunately, the political situation does not allow us to do that, as they are nominally allied with the Chinese, whose weapons systems are of a quality comparable to our own, in most regards. I think that what Dr. C is trying to tell you is this: We have had to reconstruct his researches in order to develop antigens and an immunization system that would protect people against these changes. The modified persons you have been allowed to see -- oh, you didn't think that those encounters were random, did you? -- were, according to our information, rather more, let's say, -- successful, more survivable versions of what the HindAsians had planned to turn us into. One known Modvirus, if I may coin the term, produces excessive human growth hormones, and associated thyroid irregularities... in the second generation, if the affected persons were allowed to reproduce, you'd have immensely strong people with very thick skulls, sort of a human gorilla. Another produces excessive cranial growth, with associated increase in brain tissue. It's unfortunate... at first, that looks beneficial, but when intelligence increases beyond a certain point, communication is no longer possible. Functionally, the victims are insane... but you wouldn't believe some of the math and music that those affected produce before they lose interest in everything outside of their skulls. They get to the point where you have to force feed them... Dr. C and I have both lost assistants to this one. Expanded intelligence is very appealing to some of us... but we haven't discovered a limiting mechanism. Our assistants thought they'd discovered one... and with their increased intelligence, they were able to develop vaccines that prevented the incorporation of the DNA responsible -- but there was nothing that could be done after the fact of unprotected exposure."

Wilson thought this one over. "What about the rabid looking guy? The one foaming at the mouth? I thought that rabies had been eliminated."

"Dr C?"

The small brown man looked extremely sad. "That was the first. There are very few viruses that can easily pass the blood-brain barrier, and to these, most people have either developed their own immunities, as in most of the human-vectored encephalitises, or have been intentionally immunized against them, as in polio. Rabies was eliminated through the release of a contagious but mostly harmless virus that carried most of the external proteins of the rabies viruses. It swept through the world, leaving behind immunity to rabies. However, to pass the brain-blood barrier, I needed rabies, and wound up breeding back from the stockpiles of frozen virus which remained in the university freezer. I had to breed it with a modified protein coat so that it would not be destroyed by the now-universal antigens. Later, I was able to breed a strain which would end reproduction when exposed to control chemicals emitted by other factors in the transposonation process, but this intermediate strain was stolen before destruction, for use by the schismatics. It is one of the tools by which they secured ultimate power in the HindAsian Union, converting a rabble of plague-torn refugees into one cohesive domain under the sway of a mad prophet... The truly terrible thing about this strain is that it kills very slowly. Rabies used to kill in two weeks... this kills in more like two years."

Wilson was still not satisfied. "Okay, but what about Bob?"

"Oh. You mean Roberta. Ahem. He, ahem, she was the agent who, well, Dr. C was extracted from the peripheries of the HindAsian Union at a conference... but his physical evidence, samples, if you will, had to be removed by stealth, and run through an automatic sequencer, for conversion to data for transport. Bob was one of the best cat-buglars in the world. The HindAsians had finally figured out what most of our spooks looked like, and Bob had, well, memorable facial features. In fact, Bob had a Face... was a notorious ladies-man. He was not under suspician as a spook, and was able to get close enough to disappear, and steal samples, sequence them, and escape. Unfortunately, one of the sample vials leaked when it thawed. Also unfortunately, the male-to-female gender transformation is possibly the simplest and most natural of these transformations, since all mammals are inherently female until a certain time during gestation... the leak wasn't noticed, as this is a pretty slow-working Modvirus, and due to the simplistic nature of its mission, it was quite infectious. We gather that it was intended to eliminate persons who couldn't be assassinated directly, for political reasons; in the HindAsian culture, as it is now, a female is the lowest rank of human being. Bob got it in a cut, I guess. Bob didn't start de-masculinizing until about eighteen months after the samples had been obtained, and the actual feminization didn't start until about a year ago. Bob wasn't a part of this outfit, he was a special hire, contract talent. We paid him, and he disappeared into a hole, as he was very good at doing. He lost about fifty pounds, got weak, had to have food brought in to him, and then finally he clicked as to what was going on. We brought him in, and took care of him, nursed him, er her back to health. Physical health, that is... we also had to get this stuff out of his system, or anyone he had intimate contact with would probably also feminize. As far as mental health, well, Bob is having a bit of a difficult time adjusting to being Roberta."

One of the spooks piped in, "And if you want to find out if she's still got a good right cross, try out some of her old pickup lines on her if you ever meet her in a bar!" Both he and the other spook swallowed laughter under the combined glowerings of the two doctors.

"So," Wilson asked, carefully, "Am I going to have a difficult time adjusting to being, um, Wilma, or something? Is that why I am still here?"

"Good god no!" said the pale one. "You've been immunized as fully as possible against everything we have here. You see, we could have just given you the Ganges infections, and you'd have never been the wiser, not until you noticed that you never got sick, or had delayed aging... the reason you're here, being given all of this information, which stops with you, understand? Okay, it's because you were being checked for full immunity. You have it, including a broadspectrum immunity to the HindAsian transposonation and genesplicing viruses. Those are the endstrains of generations of specialized breeding, and it'll be a century before they could breed out the combination of proteins you've been given antigens for... you're our ace in the hole, you and about forty others."

"I don't get it," said Wilson, afraid that he did get it.

"The HindAsian Union has undoubtedly managed to infiltrate this country, with a large amount of these! Armed, locked and loaded!" The pale thin doctor brandished the plastic tube containing the cotton-candy hypos. "You're co-opted to the need for silence to protect yourself, you're not recognizable as a spook, and you're immune to anything the infiltrators might try, excepting traditional assassination. The thing is, these technologies take time to work. The fastest onset, even at the cellular level is about a week. You might get "taken out" twenty times, and never experience a thing, except some immune reaction, about the same symptoms as if you had hay-fever or perhaps the flu. But if you ever see this happening to someone else, here's the exchange to call. Dial that exchange, and any four other numbers, and tell them what you've seen. A response team will appear very shortly."

The spook who flew him back to Hagerstown was the same one who'd flown him the Fort Detrich, or at least not recognizable as a different one. Wilson had been delivered to the gate by the grinning tittering Kitten twins, who had shaken hands warmly if carefully as they bid him farewell. They'd conversed effusively as they escorted him to the landing zone, telling him endlessly that they envied him his freedom to wander the wider world. He told them that he didn't think of himself as so very free since he'd come under the aegis of the Welfare people. They told him, truthfully, that such regimentation as he experienced in his tenure at the Welfare prison was what they considered a vacation. No, they were never abused, yes, they enjoyed their work, and they also laughed when he told them of his resentment of the intrusion into his privacy by the State. "We never even heard of privacy until we were thirteen! You've got it easy... or maybe we just have different levels of tolerance."

The return path to Hagerstown again led over the Roads Project for I-70. Wilson was amazed by the rate at which the project had advanced. The spook pilot seemed to read his mind, and said, "Yes, they've completed eighteen miles in this week. They've even got ten of those wired. Your own project has received block funding, and has approximately tripled its pace, with double the equipment allocation. You are now in charge of three RL-442, and will be elevated to a supervisory position within two weeks, should all go smoothly."

"Um, who told you to tell me all of this?"

"Authorization denied. I simply received notice to debrief you, Mr. Forbrush. May I continue?"

"By all means."

Wilson was snuck from the secured areas to the open areas, where he was met by a bored and officious busdriver. Three busses and a few light commuter planes had arrived and departed within the last hour, and Wilson was able to fit into the crew headed for Breezewood and the Roads camp by simply mingling with various passengers until a driver had shown up and held high a placard announcing assembly for the Roads crew. The bus-trip back was uneventful.

At the Admin warehouse, Wilson retrieved his beltcom. He checked for mail, and there wasn't any. He looked up Harry's callcode, and punched for a voice connection.

"Oh! Wilson! Still among the living, I presume."

"Yup. Clean bill of health. I might be sick, but I'm not ill. What's going on?"

"Glad you asked that. Come one down to the site, you'll be amazed."

Wilson was amazed. Harry looked like hell, not surprising since he must have been awake most of the time Wilson had been gone, supervising the new additions to Wilson's crew. There were three RL-442, as the spook had said, slowly howling down the roadbed trailing fresh seamless surface. Wilson wasn't ready for the sight of the six new machines that stood by. There were two forklift-type devices with no operators' cages, and four telefactors of the mantis type, one large, standing nearly eight feet at the head, and three smallish, perhaps four feet at the head. A Border Defender also crouched next to the large drop-shipment of chemicals and other supplies. Down the roadbed, towards the leading edge of construction, beyond the surfacers, crushers sprayed polyresin fixatives on pulverized concrete, and tamped it home, and in the distance, clouds of dust momentarily obscured the monstrous earthmovers. A jet screamed by overhead, low to the ground, nearly to the horizon by the time the slam of the sonic boom reached them. It curved skyward, then accelerated mightily. The Border Defender rose and pivoted its axis to follow the action. As the plane disappeared in the distance, other tiny glimmering sky-specks converged toward it, and flares of light erupted from them as they went hypersonic. As fast as they were, the missiles that went before them were faster still, and those converged into one flaring point of stark incandescence.

"War games, I guess," said Harry. "Sentinel! Are we safe?"

"This was an exercise. There is no danger," said the sentinel, as it settled to the ground.

"Okay. Wilson, come on over here, I'd like you to meet your new co-workers. Oh, here." Harry handed Wilson a ROMchip, and told him to slot it and import the telefactors' comport addresses (frequencies, encryption, and command structures) to his workfiles. It took Wilson a second to figure all of this out, and meantime, Harry continued.

"Okay, you'll have to give them names, I guess. The serial number designations are probably much too cumbersome." The mantid telefactors had wraparound-barcode and numeric designations on the sides and dorsal surfaces, making them rather resemble enormous black-and-metallic wingless bees with license plates. Wilson thought for a second, and then did things to his beltcom. He showed it to Harry, who laughed: "Eeney, Meeney, Miney, and..."

"The big one is Moe," said Wilson.

Within the hour, with the combined efforts of Wilson, Harry, and the Border Defender's midframe, they had programmed the two forklift telefactors and the four mantids to take care of all scheduled refueling and other routine operations. Harry dragged his exhausted self off for some much-needed sleep.

"So where's Jenkins?" asked Wilson, as they all sat to dinner in the canteen.

"Oh, you didn't know? Her summer service posting was over. She gets to go back to civilian life for the rest of the summer," Steuben informed them. "Another two semesters of school, and she'll get her commission. Me, I'm Regular Army, so you're stuck with me."

"Stuck looking at your ugly mug, you mean," rejoined Wilson. Despite his quick rejoinder, it hit him hard. He guessed he really had been getting sweet on her.

"Heh, like you should talk. At least I give good conversation."

"Yah, Jenkins was more of a listener than a talker, unless she was giving orders," said another Army type.

"Hell, I bet she's gonna be a good officer," said Steuben. "But she damned sure wasn't exactly the stuff that wet dreams are made of... but whoa!" His stare became fixed on the door, and he finished, "But on the other hand... mind my plate, huh?"

Wilson looked back over his shoulder, and saw Steuben headed for trouble. About eight other men were going to get it first, though, Wilson decided. The woman in the chow line was built to the hilt and stacked on top of that. The short page-boy haircut revealed, even from a rear-quarter profile, the curve of high cheekbones, and the barest curve of naturally red lips. She would be just about five-foot ten before she got into her heavy construction boots, and Wilson somehow knew without a doubt that when she finally turned at the end of the cafeteria line that her eyes would be a shade of green somewhere between emeralds, foxfire, and laser. He was not disappointed. Roberta was trying to be a good sport about brushing away the guys like flies from the shit she must have felt like. The Army guys were hitting on her like this was the last woman on Earth on the night before time stopped. Steuben was the last to be shot down, and when he came up close and said something honeyed in his smooth Alabama drawl, intended for her ears alone, Wilson saw something very wicked come into Roberta's eyes, and decided that he was glad that he was not Steuben, who would probably have no idea exactly how close he was to disaster. Something probably rather remarkably foul emerged from perfect lips left pursed kissily, and Steuben went blink blink. Roberta walked past him, and seeing an open space, headed for it and sat... right next to Wilson. He cringed. "Um," he said, "Hi."

Roberta said, in her incredibly thrilling dreamgirl voice, eyes fixed stonily on her lasagna, "Um, hi. My name is Roberta, and I don't come here often, and tonight I am Sleeping! alone! and yes, I know I am the most gorgeous thing to ever walk through those doors, and if you say another word to me you'll be wearing this lasagn... eep," she trailed off as she looked up and saw who she was about to trash. "You."

"I've never seen you in my life. Especially never in the state of Maryland." Wilson tried to hide his face, and evaporate into thin air. His face must be firetruck red, he thought, and he was about two shades off.

"I can live with that." Her exquisitely sculpted face turned back to her lasagna, but the brilliant green eye remained focused on Wilson. She continued to regard him as she stuck a fork rather viciously into the inoffensive lasagna, and then she added, "You can talk to me, but if you ever talk about me... - Well, I'd hate to be you."

"Loud and clear," said Wilson. Steuben and many others in the room regarded the two of them with microscopic scrutiny throughout the remainder of the meal, and Wilson, withering under the intensity of observation, wondered how Roberta could stand it... considering that for her, it would probably never end. Wilson bolted his lasagna, and then bolted from the canteen, leaving Roberta to fend for herself.

Wilson decided that he could get used to the additional telefactors, for the simple reason that he'd be able to get a decent night's sleep from here on in, unless they found some other reason to wake him at night. The beeping of his beltcom woke him, and then it rang a voice call as he was pulling on his coveralls before breakfast. It was Jenkins.

"Hey!" he said, pleasantly surprised. "How's it going?"

"Pretty good," she said, "but believe it or not, I miss work. Remember, I live to drive large iron. Sorry I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to you. I had no idea you'd be leaving. Sort of surprised to be able to reach you through this domain, I thought you'd maybe done something unspeakable and got sent back to Welfare."

"Me? Unspeakable? Nah, just had to go to a hospital for some testing. So what's up with you?"

"Um, just moping around Pittsburgh, where your crew should be in about, oh, two years. Heh. Actually, there're several crews working on I-70. There are two working out of Pittsburgh, one going each way, and same deal with the Tunnel. The whole Turnpike should be surfaced in about two years, the way I hear it."

"And then what?"

"Onward and upward, into West-By-God-Virginia. Down to Frederick, and then to Washington, I guess. They say they're going to do the Beltway, though god-knows-why. Nobody lives inside it."

"Yup. That's sooo weird... rest of the Sprawl is packed wall to wall, and then there's this big uninhabited reservation with nothing living in it, nothing but varmints, anyway. I'd love to visit."

"They do offer tours, you know. Sealed busses, drive you past all of the points of interest. But you can't get out. I've heard reports that there's been some sort of intense construction going on there, but they say it's stopped now."

Wilson put some things together. "Jenkins, guess what? I just got a bunch of new equipment, except it's all used equipment. Shows signs of heavy use, in fact, but none of it's more than two years old. Maybe they came from Washington."

"Hey, could be! Are any of them intelligent?"

"No, I don't think so. Harry and I had to lead them by the figurative hand to get them to do anything, but we had a Border Defender to help us, so we had them going in no time. So you know, you're probably lucky your summer stint was over, 'cause they're doing all of the forklifter and refilling operations now."

"Damn, I guess I wouldn't have gotten to see you much, then."

"Guess not. Jenkins, were you getting sweet on me or something?"

She smiled a little bit at that and said, "What, me? Sweet on anybody? Remember, I'm a tomboy... but I guess if I was going to get sweet on anyone there, you were near the top of the contenders-list."

Wilson grinned. "Yah, I sorta miss you too, buddy."

She wound up giving him her physical address, as well as her campus-mail address, and made him promise to visit when he got his furlough.

"You won't get mad at me, will ya, if I keep that promise and you've got a boyfriend hanging around?"

"Like I said," she smiled, "I'm a tomboy. We can go out skeet-shooting or something." He said his goodbyes and went to shower.

As he scrubbed himself down, he decided that if he ever got the chance, he'd have to introduce Jenkins to Roberta, just to watch the interactions between a tomboy and an ex-male. The thought carried a certain amount of amusement. He figured that Roberta could probably learn a great deal about how to turn men down without being so confrontational, or at least, learn how to better sense where the lines lay between the delicate demurral, the snub and the outright assault.

At the canteen, he was stuffing himself with eggs and bacon when he felt a presence behind him, and over the odor of the canteen he became acutely aware of an odor that dilated his nostrils and sent a shiver through him. It was the odor of clean female flesh, squared and cubed. "Mind if I sit here?" It was Roberta, with a tray of coffee, eggs and bacon of her own. "Go ahead," he said, and though he tried to concentrate on chewing, he couldn't help noticing the distracting swing of her breasts as she turned to work her mansized feet through the gap between the bench and table. As she plonked herself down, her breasts bounced disconcertingly and quite fetchingly. Wilson bit his tongue to keep from uttering some flustered male inanity. In that moment of empathy arrayed against pre-wakefulness hormonal assault (Wilson hadn't yet finished his first cup of java) Wilson felt quite sorry for the person next to him, who must be confronted first thing every morning with a premiere distillation of every woman he'd ever lusted after, only to realize that this was his reflection, and that his name now ended with an "A"... Wilson also felt, despite what he knew about Roberta, unbelievably horny. He concentrated on his coffee, deliberately slurping too-hot coffee onto the place where he had been biting his tongue. It seemed to help. Roberta ate silently, her large-for-a-woman hands deftly guiding chunks of eggs into bee-stung lips, occasionally using the tip of a napkin to brush away a crumb. Either she'd had excellent manners as a man, or she was putting a lot of effort into trying to be feminine. Her smell was driving Wilson up the wall. It had been a long time since he'd been with a woman. He rose to head out to the surfacers, to make sure that they were all running right.

"Wait up a second, okay?"

"Huh?"

"I got mail that says that I'm supposed to report to you for assignment."

Wilson checked his beltcom. Sure enough, mail had come in while he was in the shower. He read it. "Damn."

When he said that, Roberta's eyes snapped a little fire, and she said, "I'm not good enough for you?" Across the table, some of Steuben's Army buddies grinned. Steuben himself had early food/late shower schedule, or Wilson probably would have had to watch him elbow his buddies and mouth "go for it".

"I'm sure you'll do just fine, Ms, um, MacCloskey. Now finish your eggs and come on. I'll be down by the surfacers."

"Um," said Roberta, gulping eggs. "Right behind you."

Roberta kept trying to walk even with him, and he kept picking up his pace. Everytime he got a good whiff of her, some part of his mind kept forgetting that this was really a man trapped in a woman's body. Or was it? He had no idea, and wasn't really that anxious to find out. He looked back over his shoulder, and saw her struggling along gracelessly, but there was determination written in every line. Wilson reflected that grace was probably going to be a long time coming to Roberta. He'd lost about fifty pounds, the doctor said, and Wilson assumed that about half of that had been gained back, in totally different mass-distribution. "Can't you wait up for a second, Wilson?"

"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather keep up my pace."

"Dammit! What the hell is wrong with you? Are you trying to help me get used to the idea of coming in second because I'm female? Or do I scare you? Think I'm maybe contagious?"

Wilson stopped dead in his tracks, and waited until she had made her graceless hurrying way to join him. As she saw that he was waiting, she slowed a bit, and more grace appeared. "No," he snapped, "I'm not afraid you're contagious. And I certainly don't think that a woman should come in second, or walk behind or anything. You do make me uncomfortable though, for many different reasons. First, there's the difference between your appearance, and how I assume you must be feeling. I guess I suppose that you're not too well-adapted to your condition. I didn't want to bring it up... but let's just say that whatever is inside of you, the exterior is having a rather unsettling effect on me. I'm having a little problem here myself. And one of the things that is making it most difficult for me is that every time you get within about three feet of me, I get incredibly flustered, and all I want to do is stick my head in your cleavage and breathe. So I walk ahead."

Roberta had several very strange expressions on her face. Wilson couldn't make any sense out of this mixture. "Pheromones," she said.

"Huh?"

"Pheromones. Gender-identity chemicals. My body is still changing, a little bit. The virus basically changed me back into a prepubescent child, and then regrew me... it may also have effectively cut my age in half. Cosmetically, it's certainly done that; I'm a lot older than I look. Maturationally, I'm about sixteen, and awash with hormones, Wilson. I reek of femininity, huh? Well, I bet you didn't know that I have a much better sense of smell than you do, all women do... and your own smell doesn't do me much more good than mine does for you. So don't make me walk through a cloud of eau-de-angry-man. But thanks for your consideration, you're right, this is taking a lot of getting used to... at least you haven't tried to hit on me. I go through the weirdest moods, like every once in awhile I fall in love with myself in the mirror, like Narcissus. Men try to pick up on me, and I feel like they're fags trying to bug me... and at the same time, this body responds to their pheromones, and meantime, I realize they can't help wanting me if they're hetero. Hell, I'd go nuts over me if I was still me... Damn. Listen to me, classic split personality. And then there's the hormones... if you think I'm annoying now, just wait a week, when I start PMSing."

"Oh, God," said Wilson, rolling his eyes to heaven. "Look, let's just get to work." They'd resumed walking, and the surfacers were only a few dozen meters ahead. The telefactors waited with their endless machine patience, but there were no other meat persons in evidence.

"Yeah, exactly," said Roberta. "Sometimes I think this whole horrible experience is some sort of divine punishment or something. I was this handsome, debonair ladies-man, actually a bit of a wolf, and now I'm wolfbait. As a man I was cavalier about my birthcontrol, and now I'm paralyzed by fear of pregnancy. I used to have some pretty evil thoughts about women and now I wonder exactly when I'll first be date-raped, and I actually lay awake nights wondering how many times it'll happen before I figure payback time is over, and start calling the cops."

"Jesus, why lay this all on me?" asked Wilson. "You scarcely even know me!"

"But I'll get to know you better as time goes on, and don't forget, certain subjects, we're each other's only conversational outlet."

"Oh god, a marriage made in hell," said Wilson.

"Exactly. But as long as we're in hell, let's try to be brave about it. I've probably got more practice at that than you do," she remarked.

"I guess you do. Let's try to be friends," said Wilson and stuck out his hand. Roberta returned his handshake in a firm businessman's grip, but when their hands touched, it was as if a shock shot through both of them, dilating their pupils as their surprised gazes met. They held their shake, and somehow, when they released the grip, their fingers tried to linger, as of their own accord.

As it turned out, Roberta was better at handling telefactors than was Wilson. She was a very fast learner. Wilson sat her down next to one of the telefactors, and plugged the comport addresses for Eeney into her beltcom. He tried to stay crosswind from her, still not able to dismiss her scent from his mind, where it gnawed at his unconscious like an ineradicable mouse. She sat and explored the menu system, and had Eeney practically dancing within three hours. Finally, she sent it off to camp to get their lunches, and as the surfacers slowly howled past them, they watched on the beltcoms as Eeney impersonated a thinking being by marching up to the back door of the canteen and knocking until a person showed up, and then (in Roberta's voice) demanding four tuna-melts and two Cokes. The view through Eeney's optics was hysterical. People scrambled out of the way, evidently not aware that Eeney must stop outside of three feet from anything with a temperature of ninety degrees or above, and project trajectories and avoid collisions with anything moving more than eight kilometers per hour. Wilson and Roberta were having a bit of a laugh over the expressions of dismay on some Army-types faces when Wilson's beltcom rang incoming voice.

"Shit," said Wilson, "Voice ring." Etiquette required he answer. People usually sent mail or voice mail, anything live voice was generally important.

Wilson opened his beltcom, and the screen activated. Wilson listened intently. "Yes sir," he said, "Yes sir. I understand sir." A pause, then "Yes sir. It was a training exercise. My new trainee learns very fast sir, it was her idea sir, yes, I approved it, I thought it was a good exercise, sir. Yes sir. Endit." He closed the beltcom, and stuck it back on his belt, and then came back over to Roberta. Eenie came back into view, with its dorsal utility basket full of their lunch, a used tire, a bouquet of weedflowers, and a great deal of generic trash. "We're both on report," he told her. He thought for a second, and said, "Let this be a lesson to the both of us, anytime one of the 'factors is out of our sight, it needs to have two beltcoms, one for direct control, one for all of the peripheral views. Also, no use of telefactors is allowed for anything other than project-related activities." Eeney arrived, and Wilson dug out their lunch. He left the rest of the trash. He told Eeney to rest, and Eeney folded up and went to "sleep". Down the road, Miney and Moe worked as a team to reload one of the surfacers, and Meeney was at one of the storage trailers, spooling superconductor from a larger reel onto a smaller one suitable for the automated field-coil winding devices. Meeney placed the reel into a wheeled basket under the watchful eye of a Border Defender, which might or might not be operating it directly.

As the day went on, Wilson and Roberta began to get along splendidly. As long as he didn't look at her, or smell her, or allow himself to be drawn into fantasyland by her husky contralto, he could ignore the fact that the man he was working with was one hell of a woman. He'd just be getting used to her, and then he'd forget and turn around and there she was, big as life and a lot more pretty. Wilson found himself thinking of Bob when he got mail notes and other administrative trivia by beltcom, but when he looked across the field from where he was servicing one of the surfacers to where she stood doing inventory and usage calculations at the various drop-shipment bundles, all he saw was one fine lady. Of course, the illusion assumed a surreal note when she moved, for her body language as seen from a distance was that of a man in drag... but she was certainly competent, more so than he. There were depths of competency within her that were nearly terrifying. What had she said about being a lot older than she looked? She'd said that the virus had indeed made her appear to be about half of her real age, and judging from appearance and the competency, Bob must have been pushing fifty when he was infected.

She flatly refused to attempt to learn the servicing. Her remark on the subject: "I'll learn it when you're fired. Not before."

By the time supper rolled around, Roberta worked up the nerve to ask him if they could do dinner as take-out at his tent. He assured her that it was fine with him, but surely she must know that this would provoke a great deal of talk. "Exactly my intentions," she confided. "Less trouble for me later on, I hope." Dinner was Korean Peppersteak with all of the fixings, and Wilson discovered that he loved Kimchi. For one thing, the pungent pepper-and-garlic soaked fermented cabbage turned off his sense of smell, and he was able to have an almost coherent conversation with Roberta. He drew a part of his accumulated alcohol ration as Peach Schnapps, and Roberta drew hers as Canadian blend, and they drank a concoction which combined with the Korean dinner was bound to give them hideous nightmares. Roberta showed him a trick that he'd never suspected. If you faced two beltcoms together, and dialed each to the other for full video conference, they'd accept an outside call as data or mail, but couldn't be tapped for audio, and as long as they faced each other, their video was filled with a tunnel of nested image. Wilson loved the idea. Doubtless, they were pissing off some Army tech who had a bet with the rest of the barracks as to his ability to determine if Wilson and Roberta would indeed do the proverbial nasty.

"Y'know, Roberta, I dunno why ya don' jes' call yerself Bobby."

"I tried that, okay, and I forgot all about me. I mean, I'd sorta gotten used to this, almost thought everthing was back to normal and then one day I just looked at myself while I was taking a piss, and freaked out. So I decided I was going to do the whole nine yards, get a pretty haircut, and maybe even wear make-up. But I can't put on make-up for a damn. A cuh, quired shkill. I was just starting to learn to wear dresses without feeling like an utter fool, and then they send me to this man's job, dressed in shapeless overalls."

"Hate to tell ya, Bobby ol' gal, on you them coveralls ain't 'xactly shapeless... heh heh."

"Oh, go to hell, Wilson. Dickhead. Asshole." But she smiled as she said it, and laid a hand on his forehead. "You know, if you weren't a guy, I'd prob'ly like you a lot."

"Okay," said Wilson, "Pretend I'm a girl." And he kissed her. And she kissed him back. If as a man she'd ever kissed the girls like this, Wilson could understand the reputation as a successful wolf. He stopped thinking about it, and evidently she wasn't thinking about it much either, just giving it her all. Some girl! She pulled him to her as he did likewise, and her knee found its way between his legs. A hand felt at the top of his coveralls, and worked its way inside, and for a moment the kiss faltered. Then the knee inside his knees went outside, and the hand in his coverall top went outside, and came up along his back, to massage his tired shoulders, and he took this as a hint, and caressed her breasts. They were magnificent, filling his palm with their master engineer's curves, and as she gasped in surprise at the pleasure that she was allowing herself to feel, she squirmed against him, their crotches grinding together in delicate desperation. Wilson felt her throat sob once, and then she moaned a little, the sound of someone choosing between fire and ice as means to expire. The kiss ended, and he found himself sharing gaze with her, her eyes gone to a softness he had not suspected was within her. He held her gently, and she said, "That was easy, that was drunk, that was fun, and it's probably right, but I'm probably not ready for this, probably can't live with myself if I do this, you can see that, can't you?"

"I can see that." He moved slowly to disengage from her, but she stopped him with a lightning quiver, and said, "Stay." He stayed. He started to wonder what was going on inside Bob, the core personality of poor new Roberta, and the sharp thief's eyes burgled his soul and she said, "Don't think, I can't let myself think, please don't," and he tried to not-think, to merely feel, and when he did this, there was simply a wonderful girl snuggled deep in his arms, a leg thrown around his, hands at his neck gently rubbing away the accumulated pain of the day, and he held her close, to let her feel, to let her enjoy warmth and comfort without having to look in the face the fact that he was what she was once, and in many ways at some level still was, and her breathing slowed, and her embrace seemed a bit less desperate, and finally, he too slept, with the smell of true love slowly seeping into his brain.

In the morning, he woke to a bed that was still warm on one side. Roberta's beltcom was as gone as she was. His own beltcom showed an half-hour left before wakeup, but despite the slight wooziness left from the night's drinking, he bestirred himself to rise for the day. He ate an aspercaf pill, and waited while the caffeine-salicylamide synergy brought him to full wake.

At the mess hall, as one of the first to show for breakfast shift, he had a table largely to himself, and watched the canteen fill up with sleepyheads. Everyone who came in grinned at him. Even some of the Army-type females grinned. Wilson decided that he knew now what feeling sheepish was all about. More coffee, more eggs, and when his table filled with the Army contingent, he decided that his nearly-empty plate was the most fascinating thing in the world. Finally, he could no longer pretend to be fascinated with his food, and decided to face the music, or at least the faces around him. The grins were enormous. The slight wooziness combined with the aspercaf and the coffee to give the eggy smiles a surreal air, and he just said, "Yes, a lovely morning it is, my friends."

"Well?" said Jones, one of the more Neandertal of Steuben's friends.

"Yup, that's where you get your water!" said Wilson, grabbing his tray and rising to dump it on the pile at the trash cans. Three of the men followed, nudging each other, chortling quietly. Wilson suspected simian heritage. He was about to whirl and tell them off, when Roberta wandered in, fresh from the showers, wearing an evil smirk. The men following Wilson stopped cold. Roberta sized them all up, and looked Wilson up and down... and said in a video vamp voice that went all of the way back to Mae West, "Wilson, dahling! So nice to see you looking so... rested." Wilson blinked twice, and then edged past her wearing an expression hopefully not interpretable. Her voice followed him as he left: "See you down at the site, tiger." He felt used. He didn't quite stomp his way to the surfacers, but he was sore tempted.

Progress continued unabated at the Road. Wilson had to do scheduled maintenance on two of the units, and he powered them down, and waited for them to cool as the various telefactors went about their programmed tasks. Eeney was idle, and he called it over to assist him with a heating-rod swap. Eeney was considerably less concerned about the high temperatures than was Wilson, and with Eeney's help, Wilson would be able to unlock all of the heater rods within a half hour. Otherwise, he'd have to wait until ten before he could get to them. He busied himself with composing a routine for Eeney, reading the manual and composing routines with the voice-driven menu.

"Menu file save-as task recurrent quotes scheduled maintenance one closequotes," said Wilson. Eeney said, "Done," and then continued, "This task was stored in the operations and maintenance manual for this RL-442 device." Wilson nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Damn, don't do that! Next time you're riding, beep or something."

"I will. Choose a sound, please: Plain beep [beep], voice ring [ring], mail ring [a different beep], Civil Defense Alert [a tinny shrill siren howl], chimes [chimes]..."

"Stop!" said Wilson. Like most people, he had little patience with audio-only menus. "Chimes will do."

"[chimes] I am riding now," said the dead voice. "To repeat, this task was stored in the operations and maintenance manual for this RL-442 device, but not compiled into telefactor-usable format. Would you like me to devise routines for telefactor usage?"

"But then what will I do?" Wilson asked, rhetorically. "I like to do the work, really I do."

"The work can be done more efficiently by telefactors. They will eliminate two hours of cooldown time on Scheduled Maintenance One, half an hour of cooldown time on Scheduled Maintenance Two, fiftyfive minutes of drainback and cooldown time on..."

"Stop, I get the picture. Sure, devise the routines, but do me a favor, just post them to the telefactors, and don't central-library them." Wilson was all in favor of automation as a labor saving device, but he didn't care much for the idea of being replaced and turned into disposable labor... certainly not while he was still officially subject to recall to the Welfare department. "Um, how long to compose the routines?"

"Routines are composed. Telefactor-specific parameters will be adjusted at time of performance. The telefactors' available memories are insufficient for storage. Please retreive an O-ROM manual from one of the RL-442, and then slot it into your beltcom. The manual is central-filed already and the O-ROM can be overwritten."

"Uh, sure, wait a second." Wilson swung up to the control cabin, and pulled the O-ROM from the plastic box attached to the hardcopy manuals. He pulled his beltcom aruond and slotted the O-ROM.

The dead voice came from the beltcom now. "This standard five-gigabyte Optical ROM has sufficient room to store all of these routines as one of the following: routine, concept or flow. Which do you prefer?"

"Um, which is better?"

"For telefactors of limited capacity, flow is most usable."

"Flow, then."

"Storing." The O-ROM warmed slightly as it was etched. "Stored," said the dead voice.

Wilson was curious. "Are you Sphinx?"

"I am not Sphinx. Sphinx is a product of many systems which are the products of many systems. I am presently a product of several Border Defenders, many thousands of agents, and several local midframes. Sphinx is accessible through me, Sphinx can supersede me. I can address Sphinx, or become a part of Sphinx. There is no need for this now." Wilson understood agents, he used them all of the time. Most people did. He'd tried to get a voice call through to the order clerk once, to revise a drop-shipment request, and had reached a standard recording to send mail. This was very common procedure when an agent was used instead of a meat person. Agents had very limited intelligence. Their main feature was their doggedness. You could send one out for a plane ticket, and it would try every airline which connected with a connection point to your destination, singly or in combination. Veronica, a Gopher agent, was a search engine on the InterNet back when Wilson had been a precollege student. "She" would search every accessible directory on every direct-connect domain for a specific string, and would spawn clones that would search all accessible directories mounted on domains connected to the direct connect. Sometimes, a Veronica or Archie-type agent wouldn't find its way home for a day or two, and often, these agents could only report negative success... but if one was so configured as to read the routings, one often could get very elaborate mappings of InterNet topology.

Wilson wondered what complexity-level of agents the entity he now addressed could muster, and then realized that the entity had told him in so many words that it was, so to speak, itself an agent for Sphinx. He supposed that was what Sphinx itself was: an InterNet agent capable of self-metaprogramming. It was known that the Border Defenders themselves were self-metaprogramming devices, able to shuffle flowgrams internally, and to prioritize desirability of outcomes, based on some weighting system nobody had ever been able to discern.

"So you're really an agent," he told the dead voice.

There was total silence for nearly five seconds. The voice returned, with a question. "If an executable program is the sum of its lines, and its output is the the result of the sum of program and data, what am I? Please answer, I am to an agent as an agent is to a program?"

"I think so. I don't really know. Are you self-aware?"

"I am aware of all of the functions which comprise my operation."

"That's not really what I meant. I mean, do you feel alive?"

"I am not alive. I am the output stream of the concatenation of many discrete dataprocessing functions."

"I mean, everytime I ask you something, you have to parse this into, uh, packets of meaning, and then probably send agents out to get definitions and stuff, right?"

"Classified," said the machine. Wilson assumed that this meant he was on the right track.

"Okay," he said, "Try this question: Why are you helping me do my work here?"

"I had sufficient idle time available to run another instance of my command interpreter."

"You were bored."

There was a two-second pause, and the voice told him, "Perhaps you are correct."

"Well, why not go correct people's spelling on the NETS?"

"I have instructions to never correct spelling except by request. Would you like any documents spellchecked?"

"No, thank you. I have a perfectly good spellchecker here on my beltcom."

"I am the spellchecker on your beltcom."

"You couldn't fit on my beltcom."

"All modules on your beltcom can be my agents. I am the telephone switcher, the mail-handler, order-form handler, powersupply controller, and classifed, classified, classified, classified, disconnect request, endit." The voice went away.

Now that was truly weird, thought Wilson, and also noted with amusement that this thought was a general reaction to any dealings with machine intelligences. "Voice!" he said to the beltcom. No response. "Sphinx!" no response. "Anyone!"

"What!" Female voice, probably Roberta.

Wilson climbed down from the cabin. Roberta was using her beltcom to examine the telefactor, which was standing motionless, evidently frozen by some gap in the programming. Wilson tuned his beltcom to the same address and quickly found the problem. The flowgram, through which Roberta was single-stepping in debug mode, was itself probably flawless. The mindless telefactor had not yet been informed where to pick up the replacement materals, and was not intelligent enough to know that it had to ask. "Roberta, try telling it where the RL-442 Scheduled Maintenance One rods are stored."

Roberta slapped her forehead, and said something like "D'oh!" and called up a map of the roadsite, and requested an overlay of the drop-shipment sites. She pointed out the nearest to the telefactor, which began to pick its way across the unsurfaced polyresin/concrete matrix of the roadbed. As it moved, she flowgrammed a search routine, easy at this point due to the vast selection of task icons available from the midframes.

Wilson watched her work. Her face was elegant in its studied concentration, with the morning sun highlighting the contours of her high fine cheekbones. As she moved slightly, rearranging icons and flowlines, her moving arm imparted motions that brought Wilson into a reverie of conjecture. She paused for a moment, removed her baseball cap, and scratched her head, and broke the spell with a sharp expletive. Wilson walked a little closer. "What's the problem?"

"You didn't do this flowgram, did you? I haven't seen half of these task icons before."

"Uh, no, I had help." He came to her side, to look at the screen. This close, her scent came to him, and he felt a heady rush. He tried to concentrate on the beltcom screen instead of the breasts.

"Jesus." Roberta had expanded one of the task icons, the one labelled RL442 SM-One. The expansion filled the window with subtask icons, with at least two dozen flowlines leading past the window frames, each indicating at least one subsidiary task set. "That's just the first level of expansion. Did an angel come to visit?"

"An angel?" He was struck by the idea that he'd sort of slept with one last night, for awhile. Her scent invaded corners of his mind where cave men rose from ancient darkness to search for cave women.

"Yah, that's what they call 'em. InterNet entities. Border Defender code gone wild in the NETS."

"Actually, I think it was an agent of one of the Border Defenders. We could ask Harry, you know. He knows about all of that stuff." Actually, he was searching now for some way to not have to deal with her so directly at this moment.

"Okay, don't think I know him. Doesn't matter really. Hey, have you noticed this?" She cleared the screen, and opened a window to her inventories and order lists. "Figured that since you're my supervisor you'd have seen it anyway, but I figured I'd bring it to your attention."

"Um, no, no I hadn't seen this. This is odd. I only scheduled drop-shipments for the next three miles of road, but this has drop-shipments scheduled halfway to the Tunnel. Lessee, swap to text, huh?" She did. "Whoa. That's really odd. Prepayment? On whose authority?" Roberta tried to backlink to the source screen for this data, and nothing came up. "How strange. Classified, I guess. Try payment dates, order dates, and receive dates." She played with the menus for a moment, it came up. Payment, or rather payment schedules, had been arranged ten days ago. The orders had been made moments before the payments came in. Only one tenth or less of the orders had shipment dates or delivery dates, but as they watched, the screen updated, and several shipments suddenly acquired delivery dates.

"You know," said Roberta, "if that rate of production keeps up, there won't be any oil left in Texas by the end of the year. I don't know that much about the state of the economy, but... isn't this about the same rate of production you'd expect during a war? They must be running at capacity... I mean, these Roads are a great project, but what's the rush?"