Net Force

11

When the phone rang, Alex Michaels was in his garage, working on the Prowler. He was fairly certain he knew who was calling. He wiped his hands on the greasy rag and reached for the receiver.

"Hello?"

"Dadster!"

"Hey, Little Bit, how you doin'?"

"Great. Well, except for I fell while I was skating and kinda wrecked a knee pad."

He felt a stab of concern. "You okay?"

"I'm fine, but the knee pad is like, you know, scraped silly."

"Better it than you."

"That's what Momster said."

In the background, he heard Megan: "Let me talk to Daddy for a minute, hon."

Michaels felt his belly twist, his bowels go cold and tight.

"Mom wants to talk to you."

He took a deep breath. "Sure. Put her on."

"Bye, Dadster."

"Bye, Little Bit."

Time stretched. Aeons rolled past. Civilization decayed, fell into ruin…

"Alex?"

"Hi, Megan. What's up?"

"Susie, why don't you go make Mom a cup of coffee, okay?"

Michaels suddenly felt as if he was in free fall.

A moment passed. "Look, Alex, I know you put your job at the top of your list, but your daughter still thinks the moon rises in her father's shadow. Are you going to be able to break loose and come to her play?"

The years of arguments threatened to break out again — fresh blood from old wounds never healed, at least not on his heart. He didn't want to fight with her. "That's in October, right?"

"You remembered. Amazing."

She could still cut him with her sarcasm as easily as a new razor-sliced paper.

This whole deal with Day's death would probably be over by then; if not, it was doubtful it would still be boiling so hot he couldn't step away from the stove long enough to see his daughter's second-grade play. He said, "I'll be there."

"You sure?"

"I said I'd be there." She could always do that, too, spark him to anger without raising her voice, with the most innocent phrase. You sure? If she'd called him a damned liar, it would have sounded exactly the same to him.

There was an uncomfortable pause. In the last year they were together, there had been more of those uncomfortable moments than anything else. Not so much anger as resignation. The inevitable end of their marriage had oozed toward them like a glacier, slow but inexorable, grinding flat everything in its path.

She said, "Listen, there's something else. I'm seeing someone. I wanted you to hear it from me."

The coldness in his belly hardened into shards of liquid oxygen so frigid they stopped his breathing. When he found his voice again, he put everything he had into keeping it level, light, mildly curious.

"Anybody I know?"

"No. He's a teacher at Susie's school. Not her teacher."

"Well. Congratulations."

"We aren't about to get married, Alex, we're just seeing each other socially. You've been dating, haven't you?"

He waited just a little too long before he replied: "Sure."

"Jesus, Alex."

And that summed up years of discussions, too. He hadn't been with another woman since he and Megan had split. He'd thought about it a few times. Certainly he still noticed attractive women, even had brief fantasies. But he'd never acted on them. Once the fantasy passed, the reality was still out there, the risk. And he still missed Megan, despite all that had happened. She'd been the love of his life. She always would be. If she called and asked him to come home, he'd go, even if it cost him everything else — the condo, the car, the job. He hadn't known that before, but he knew it now. Too late, of course. It wasn't going to happen. They were divorced. She was seeing another man. Maybe even sleeping with him.

It further churned his stomach, made him want to throw up, the idea of Megan naked with another man, laughing, making love, doing things he and she had once done. What was worse was knowing that she wanted another man — and not him. Knowing that she would enjoy it…

Michaels shook his head. He had to get off this track.

He didn't have the right to feel this way anymore — if he'd ever had that right.

"I have to go. Tell Susie I love her."

"Alex—"

"Good-bye, Megan. Take care."

He put the phone's receiver gently back into the cradle, then looked at the purple car upon which he now spent each spare minute. Usually, he was able to fend off the feelings about Megan. As long as he kept busy, as long as he didn't let himself stop and think about it, he was fine. But when he heard her voice, when her words caused him to paint a picture of her in his mind, it was impossible.

Maybe there was a magic spell somewhere that would erase all the bad between them; maybe there were some magic words that would put them back together as they had been when Susie had still been in their future, or even when she'd been a fat and laughing babe toddling around that big old house in Idaho.

Maybe there were such words — but Alex Michaels had not found them.

Toni Fiorella had just gotten off the phone with her mother, a Sunday morning ritual that usually ran twenty or thirty minutes before Mama began getting antsy: "This must be costing you a fortune, baby," Mama would say.

No matter how many times Toni had told her mother she could afford a couple of hours of long-distance charges a month between Washington and the Bronx, it didn't seem to sink in. Mama remembered the days when long-distance phone calls had been a major luxury, reserved for birth or funeral announcements, maybe a quick ring on holidays. And the idea of getting a computer and simply using E-mail or voxtrans was out. Mama did not hold with such things.

For the last fifteen minutes while they visited, Toni had been puttering around the kitchen. She'd rinsed dishes, put them into the washer, wiped the counters and chopping block, even dust-mopped the floor. The apartment was small, but the kitchen was bigger than usual in a place this size, and the vinyl floor looked enough like real wood to fool most people at first glance. A nice place.

As she was putting the dust mop away, the phone rang.

Was that her mother calling back for something?

"Hello?"

"Deputy Commander Fiorella?"

"Yes?" The voice had a familiar sound, but she couldn't place it.

"This is Jesse Russell. We, uh, met the other day."

A Southern accent, the voice. Wait — she had it. "Spandex."

"Ma'am?"

Toni hadn't realized she'd said the word aloud until he'd responded. She flushed, glad the visual wasn't on. "Sorry, Mr. Russell, never mind. What do you want?"

"Well, ma'am, I wanted to apologize. For that business in the gym. I was showing off for Barry and I kinda put my brain on hold. I shouldn't have acted that way. It was stupid and I'm sorry."

Toni grinned. Well, well. Would wonders never cease? An asshole apologizing. And because she knew she shouldn't have done what she had done, she could be gracious about it now. "It's all right, Mr. Russell, forget about it."

"No, ma'am, I'm not likely to forget that anytime soon. I was, uh, wondering if maybe you might be willing to show me some more of the style sometime? You know, so I could see what you did instead of decorating the floor with my backside?"

Toni chuckled. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all. He had a certain charm. She said, "If we run into each other at the gym, sure."

"Well, Miz Fiorella, if you could tell me when you might be working out again, I could arrange my schedule to break loose for a while. They keep us pretty busy in class, but we are allowed some free time now and then."

Toni thought about it for a second. Was this guy hitting on her? Or was he really interested in learning silat? Background in another art was a hindrance sometimes, but not always. And Guru kept telling her she needed students, that she'd never really master the art until she taught it.

"I sometimes do mornings, but I usually work out on my lunch hour, noon to one. You could drop by if you want."

"Oh, yes, ma'am, I want."

"Might as well drop the ‘ma'am' and ‘Miz Fiorella' stuff. I'm Toni."

"I'm Rusty to my friends," he said. "Thank you. You gonna be at the gym Monday?"

"Unless something comes up."

"I'll see you there, ma'am — I mean, Toni."

She found herself smiling as she put the dust mop away. Spandex — Russell — had been pretty much a typical macho idiot from his reactions both before and immediately after she'd decked him. But this call, assuming there weren't any hidden agendas in it, made up for some of that. Most people deserved a second chance most of the time. Lord knows she'd stepped into things she'd regretted, and had been glad to be on the receiving end of somebody's forgiveness.

People could change. She had to believe that. And he wasn't all that bad-looking, either.

She immediately felt a twitch of disloyalty. Whatever else Russell might be, he was not Alex, in no way, shape or form. Alex was who she wanted. And sooner or later, if she worked hard enough, maybe he would want her, too.

But a student wouldn't be so bad. And who knows? A good-looking student might give Alex a jolt, show him Toni was somebody to look at. It couldn't hurt.

Jay Gridley cranked up the big motor on the Viper, and left a trail of smoking rubber as he popped the clutch and burned up the freeway's on-ramp. Why not? He didn't have to buy new tires in VR.

He had spent a good part of the last few days cruising the net, looking for more roadblocks, but so far, nothing out of the ordinary. Oh, yeah, sure, there were traffic snarls, a fender bender here or there, but those were normal.

He was on the 405 close to LAX when a black kid on a big hog whined past, doing eighty. Gridley smiled at the kid on the Harley. He knew who that was, even if the VR image was a little older and more muscular.

He upshifted, felt the Viper strain to be released and let it go as he pressed the accelerator to the floor. The big V-10 rumbled, roared, and the traffic around him turned into a painting.

He surged the little car from sixty to ninety in a couple of seconds. Ka-wham!

Born to be wild, and if you can't drive it, pal, park it!

He pulled alongside the black kid on the bike, grinned, honked his horn.

In reality, the two of them were linked via the net in a real-time on-line connection, much as twenty million or so other people did every day on the big commercial nets, but the VR visual mode made it so much more fun, when the software allowed for overlapping scenarios like this one.

"Hey, Tyrone!"

The kid looked over and grinned, showing bright and even teeth. "Hey, Jay Gee! What're you doin' here?"

"Looking for trouble."

"I'm with that program!"

"Yo, there's a truck stop up ahead on the right. You want to pull over and have a cup of coffee? I need to ask you something."

"Sure, nopraw, Jay."

The kid goosed the bike and leaned into the wind, the airstream ruffling his clothes and even his tight curly hair. He pulled away, and Gridley let him get ahead.

Nopraw? Jay considered it for a moment. Ah. No problem.

He wasn't that old, but the cutting edge was always moving, and he knew he wasn't on it anymore. The slangspeak hot when he was a kid was ancient history to somebody Tyrone's age. "Nopraw" would be like his "Sweat not," or his father's "No probleemo, Batman." The language shifted, changed and sometimes, circled around completely. "Cool" became "hot" became "bad" became "groovy" became "cool" again. No way you could keep up.

He was twenty-eight, but talking to a kid like Tyrone made him feel like a pile of dinosaur bones. He shook his head.

Then again, kids who rode the net seriously saw and heard things that adults missed, and Gridley wanted to use every resource he could get his hands on. This was about getting the job done, not about who lifted what.

He put his blinker on and pulled into the exit lane. If things kept going the way they were, by the time Tyrone was Gridley's age, he'd be doing stuff that would make this look like stick figures carved into stone.