Private Lives

2

Megan surged to her feet and snapped a command at her family’s computer suite. The holographic image of Captain Winters’s angry face disappeared like a popping soap bubble.

I thought she was recording this for Leif, Matt thought. But now was obviously not the time to bring that up.

“We don’t need to see any more of that,” Megan said angrily. “Or any more of that newsman’s smirking face.”

“I’m gonna call up HoloNews right now and see if I can get his butt fired.” Maj Green’s voice was too loud and her face was red.

Rummaging through her bag, she came out with her wallet. Maj flipped through IDs, transit passes, and credit cards until she came to a shiny silver surface. This was the foilpack keypad, a control center built right into the wallet. Hidden circuitry imbedded in the heavy plastic could be instructed to run in various modes.

Maj punched in the code to turn the wallet into a phone with short, emphatic gestures. Her fingers tapped through another code, and she glared at a readout.

“The station’s number is 555–1100,” she announced, extending her glare to everybody in the room. “What’s the problem? Am I moving too fast for you all? Where are those phones, people? We’ve got a career to fry!”

“I don’t know if I want to go that far,” David Gray said slowly, digging out his wallet. “But the question was cruel — and crude. We don’t need that kind of attack journalism. That’s what I’ll tell them.”

“These news-idiots don’t think. They just go for the hottest buttons to push,” Andy complained. Like David, he pulled out his wallet and began dialing.

“News-idiots is right,” Catie fumed. “Mass-media reporters have been at this for — what? Eighty years now? And they still ask the stupidest questions. I did a report on the early space missions. The clips of the flights I studied were amazing. You’d see these clowns shove a microphone in the face of some astronaut’s wife to ask, ‘How will you feel if the rocket crashes?’ Well, duh! What a surprise when the poor woman starts crying her eyes out!”

She came up with her wallet.

“What’s that number again?” she asked.

In moments, all the Net Force Explorers were in phone mode, calling the local broadcast station with various messages in mind. They mostly got busy signals.

“We’re probably overloading the local node,” Megan said with a sigh, cutting off her call.

“Maybe some of us should hold off and see if the others have more of a chance,” Matt suggested.

“Let the people who are really hot on talking to the station go first,” David said with a glance at Maj. “A couple of us could call round to other Net Force Explorers. Let’s see if we can’t get calls coming in from all over the city.”

Maj and Andy chose to keep pounding on the HoloNews switchboard. David switched his wallet circuitry to directory mode and began calling out phone numbers. Matt and Megan dialed those numbers in, calling on other Net Force Explorers and asking them to spread the word.

By the time Matt headed for home, the kids had created a new, growing — and very angry — grass-roots movement. Still, as he went to turn on the evening news, Matt hoped he wouldn’t see a story on the release of Stefano “The Bull.” It wasn’t that he expected to see James Winters’s disturbing reaction again if the reports were on the news. Or that he wanted to avoid looking at it, either. But he figured images of the capo getting out of jail would upset the captain. Matt hoped Captain Winters could be spared that pain.

Luckily, the usual turbulent politics of the Balkan Peninsula came to the rescue. NATO air power was moving against terrorist safe havens inside the Carpathian Alliance after a particularly ugly bomb blast in a market town across the border. The newscast was full of military briefings, hollering in the U.N., and street demonstrations. For tonight, at least, the attention of HoloNews — and its viewers — was focused thousands of miles away from a local organized crime boss strolling to freedom. Thank God, Matt thought, watching the sports come on.

Leif Anderson winced as he popped into virtual reality. Time for another adjustment to the lasers on my computer-link couch, he thought, riding through the pain and mental static.

Like almost everyone above the age of five, Leif had special circuitry implanted around his skull so he could directly interface with computers. But an attack by some cyber-vandals who’d committed mayhem at a baseball game Leif had attended had increased his neural sensitivity to veeyar transmission — almost, though not quite, to the point of rendering it impossible. Unless every component of the process — from the lasers carrying the information between his brain and his computer to the neural receivers implanted just below his right ear to the computer itself — was tuned just right, Leif’s entrance to veeyar made his head feel as if someone were trying to yank his brain right through the top of his skull.

Taking a deep breath, Leif opened his eyes to take in the computer reality he was visiting while his body rested back home in New York. He often thought that the monthly national get-togethers of the Net Force Explorers would be a lot more colorful if the members designed the meeting space. Certainly the local Net Force Explorers node was a sight to behold.

Instead, the national meetings usually took place in a government-issue veeyar built for practicality instead of flash. The walls kept expanding like the skin of a balloon, but they weren’t being pushed outward by air molecules. The growing crowd of Net Force Explorers logging in kept the virtual room growing to hold them.

Leif always cut his schedule pretty fine when he arrived for meetings. Like all cybertravelers, theoretically he “moved” at the speed of light — or at least as close to it as the processing speed of the Net servers would let him. So it wasn’t getting there that slowed him down. It was finding all the people he wanted to see and getting them together. He liked to show up on meeting night with just enough time to hook up with his friends before the business of the evening started.

This time around Matt Hunter was the first to spot Leif’s thatch of red hair.

“So how are things in New York?” Matt asked, slipping his way through the crowd to stand at Leif’s side. He hesitated for a moment. “Did Megan ever give you a copy of the captain’s interview?”

“No, she did not,” Leif said definitely. “I’ve gotten a couple of calls and a whole bunch of e-mail on the subject from nearly everybody I know. But when I asked Megan if I could see the actual show, you’d think I was asking for the filthiest of feelthy peectures.”

Matt shrugged. “Well, the broadcast did get Megan — and a lot of other people, including Captain Winters — pretty upset.”

“Upset doesn’t quite cover it,” Leif told him. “I finally decided to call the local HoloNews outlet. When I got hold of the switchboard and requested a copy, you’d have thought I’d initiated a level-three security breach.”

That got a quick laugh from Matt. “A lot of the kids in this group have organized to express their…opinion — perhaps disapproval might be a better word — of the show.” He gave Leif a lopsided smile. “The station people have reason to act pretty defensive when it comes to callers about that show.” Leif nodded.

“Particularly callers who sound on the young side.”

Leif gave Matt a long look. “Normally, I’d pester David for the real story on the interview. But when I tried calling him, he said he was too busy to talk. I’d bet he’s pretty involved in that ‘disapproval’ thing. Can you take me through what went down?”

Matt retold the story of the interview quickly. “Up to the end, it was a typical puff piece. ‘What a nice civic group you’ve got here, Captain Winters.’ Then the interviewer went into attack mode.”

Matt paused for a second. “The guy must have been annoyed at the way Winters was handling him, because he made some snide comment about the captain being too cool. Then he asked if Winters knew about Stefano ‘Steve the Bull’ Alcista being paroled that day.”

Matt looked sick. “From there on, it’s sort of engraved in my memory. The news-drone asked, ‘Isn’t he the organized-crime figure who was accused of conspiracy and murder in the car-bombing that killed your wife?’”

“Whoa!” Leif burst out.

Matt nodded. “Guy’s lucky that looks can’t kill. Otherwise he’d have wound up as a burnt patch on the carpet. Captain Winters looked downright scary. I’ve known the man for years and never seen anything like it.” Matt’s voice went lower. “It was worse than scary, Leif. Winters looked as if he was fighting for control of his expression, muscle by muscle. But his eyes…” He shook his head. “I would not want anyone that angry at me, much less someone who looked as dangerous as Captain Winters looked at that moment.”

Leif silently shook his head. “So there was a Mrs. Winters? It seems almost impossible to believe.”

“They say it’s Marine sergeants who grow from spores,” Matt tried to joke. “Not officers.”

Leif didn’t even comment on Matt’s jibe. He stuck with the topic at hand. “I always thought of the captain as — I dunno—The Captain, a work of art carved and perfected. Talking about him with a wife — somehow it just feels wrong. It’s like talking about The Thinker being married.” He gestured helplessly. “Just like I always think of Captain Winters being at work. It’s hard to picture him goofing off, much less sharing his life with someone.”

“Maybe he became all business after he lost his wife,” Matt suggested.

A thoughtful light appeared in Leif’s eyes. “You might be right. And this Alcista guy was supposed to be involved in her death?”

Matt’s expression began to look worried. “Leif — you’re not thinking—?”

That’s the unfortunate part of having a reputation for plots and tricks, Leif thought. Everybody expects you to jump right in and start being clever.

He was glad of Matt’s interruption when the other members of their crew came swarming around — at least, at first.

“Here’s the guy we need!” Maj Green called out in her usual blunt way. “Leif will come up with something to make that news guy wish he’d never been born.”

“What a wonderful idea — two wrongs to make a right. It’s even traditional.” David Gray sounded exasperated, as if this particular argument had been going on for some time.

“You want to turn the other cheek, Gray?” Maj retorted. “You’ll probably end up with somebody’s boot on it.”

Leif was wondering how to calm them both down when a new interruption distracted everybody.

One of the virtual walls in this corner of government cyberspace suddenly retreated to create a small stage. Captain James Winters stood surveying the crowd of Net Force Explorers. If Leif had thought David was exasperated, Winters looked like he had the market cornered on the feeling — locked and loaded, squared and cubed.

Thanks to one of the small miracles of veeyar, the captain’s voice drowned out all the other conversations, almost as if he were speaking through a heavy-duty PA system.

“Before I start this meeting officially,” Winters said, “I want to devote a few words to my recent holo appearance — or rather the reaction to it. This stuff has gotten way out of hand.”

A protesting rumble came from the young Net Force Explorers, but Winters talked right over it. “HoloNews has temporarily suspended Mr. McGuffin’s e-mail after all the spam and flame that ended up there. And I myself have had to delete Mr. McGuffin’s personal address several times from the Net Force Explorer Net — even in nodes for chapters outside of D.C.”

“I have a direct order to impart here,” he said, stabbing his finger in the air, a short, emphatic gesture. “I’ll be as plain as possible. Stop trying to punish Jay-Jay McGuffin.”

“He pulled a lousy trick!” an angry voice rose from the crowd.

“Maybe. But he was doing his job — badly, I might agree — still, I knew I might end up tripping over a land mine when I went in there. It comes with the territory when you deal with the media. They want ratings, which means their shows — even the puff-piece shows — have to be exciting.”

Winters took a deep breath. “Anyway, I would take it as a personal favor if you all left Mr. McGuffin alone.”

His voice grew grimmer. “As for Stefano Alcista, his files are still under judicial lock, and I expect you to respect that. It’s against the law to tamper with those files, and I know you’ll keep that in mind. I am also sure that none of you would be stupid enough to try tangling with a professional criminal and known Mob insider. You’d end up worrying about a lot worse things than my reaction to an overeager reporter.”

Leif stared as Winters’s face became all planes and angles, as if the flesh had drawn tight over the bones of his skull. Wherever Winters had gone in thought in that instant, it was a mental landscape Leif hoped he never discovered himself. “I’d rather not have another person on my conscience when it comes to Steve the Bull.”

Winters shook his head a little as if he was trying to fling that thought away. His voice changed, too, as he said, “Now that we’ve dealt with that, welcome to the national meeting of the Net Force Explorers, October 7, 2025.” That was the official opening of the meeting. From this point on, everything would be recorded. The captain was clearly determined to route a path back to normalcy both for himself and for the Net Force Explorers, as quickly as possible.

Leif glanced around. Everyone was quiet as the captain dealt with various matters. By all appearances this was a typical meeting — just business as usual. But as the guest speaker was introduced, Leif couldn’t help noticing the tension that remained in the air. He was reminded of an old saying of his father’s: “You could cut the atmosphere with a knife.” Right now, given the stress in this room, a chisel or laser — one with a lot of firepower — would be a more appropriate tool. Despite the captain’s pleas, it was clear that this wasn’t over, not by a long shot. Leif could only hope that nothing terrible would happen before it was.