Dani had not yet discovered all the limits of the magical blue ring she wore, but she did know this much: it could neither produce a television, nor tell her how to get the TV in Perfect’s barracks out of the internal menu program it had become stuck on and onto a channel with some anime.
She figured that the TV set in the living room of the other building had to be hooked up to normal cable, since that whole area was supposed to be incognito, so she headed downstairs. The two buildings were connected by a tunnel in the basement… the access way for a shared bomb shelter, actually. Dani had found that more interesting than Perfect’s security system or any of the other improvements she’d added, even though it had actually come with the buildings.
Some of the basement halls in her school—her old school, she reminded herself, as there was very little chance she’d ever go back to it—had been labeled “fallout shelters”, though she’d never understood how regular hallways that were just open at the ends were supposed to protect you from a nuclear bomb in the first place, and the signs were all faded and peeling now. Nobody cared about nuclear bombs any more.
An actual bomb shelter, though… sealed away underground, with plenty of food and water and nothing but time to think and read and watch DVDs on a portable player… that idea spoke to Dani. She’d always been a bit of a claustrophile, and a lot of an introvert.
She didn’t have her player or any DVDs at the moment, though, or else she wouldn’t have needed to find a working TV. So, she didn’t stray from the connecting hallway into the shelter, but continued on towards the door on the other side. She stopped mid-step, her hand stretched out towards the doorknob… was that voices?
It was definitely a voice… Perfect’s. Dani had thought Adonis had said she was heading out, but apparently that was one more thing he’d gotten wrong.
Well, one thing.
Well, the guy was a jerk.
But this left Dani facing a dilemma. If Perfect had company, was this the sort of company that would understand a strange young woman coming out of the bomb shelter passage? She didn’t yet feel at home on Perfect’s territory, and didn’t know what was expected of her, in this kind of situation. She knew Perfect had a secret identity, and that she was trying to keep a low profile about her base… but after a moment’s reflection, she realized that anybody who was down in the basement lab with Perfect would obviously have some idea about the weirdness in her life.
That didn’t mean that a discreet knock wasn’t a good idea, though… just to be safe. It sounded like she’d be interrupting something.
“Yes, Professor Fluffykins,” Perfect was saying. “I understand what you’re saying.”
Professor Fluffykins? Dani thought.
“I just don’t see how it… meme theory? As an allegorical model, yes, fine, but literally… okay,” she continued. “Okay, okay, okay… okay! I get where you’re going. Robotic species, no DNA. They aren’t engineers or innovators, they’re just… self-perpetuating patterns. Their language, whatever else it does, must contain instructions for… what? Hey, I can’t stand it when you guys all blurt out… look, don’t make me go all parliamentary procedure on your tails.”
Tails? Dani had an image of Perfect holding a conference of some kind with a bunch of anthropomorphic animals. Cats, probably, though Dani couldn’t imagine a self-respecting anthro that would deign to answer to “Professor Fluffykins.”
Though how cool would it be if she opened the door and it turned out that anthros were real? Well, she knew there were robots and mutants and aliens and magic and things, after all. There were weirder things in the world.
Note to self, she thought. Find out if ring can do fur. She’d save that for later, though… she wanted to make a good impression on Perfect’s guests, whoever or whatever they were.
“It’s too noisy in here!” Perfect declared suddenly… and from the sound, from much closer than she had been. The door flung open. It was hard to say which of them was more startled, Perfect for finding Dani standing there… or Dani for spotting the stuffed animals carefully arranged on the lab table, around a plastic tea set. All rabbits, including the one that Perfect dragged around… or his ninja cousin.
There was nary an anthropomorphic animal person in sight.
“Uh, hi,” Dani said. “Oh, hey, are you having a tea party?”
“No!,” Perfect said. “I’m having a meeting, at which tea is being… I mean, this is really just a sort of experiment in… it’s an exercise.”
Dani stepped past her, drawn to the odd yet somehow comforting sight of the plush toys propped up in a circle. She preferred posable action figures herself, but there was something distinctly feminine about them, in a little kiddy kind of way.
Maybe Perfect has a loli thing, she thought. Gross.
Even as she thought this, though, a pang cut through her disdain.
“You know, I never really got to have tea parties with dolls,” Dani said.
“They aren’t dolls, they’re stuffed animals,” Perfect said. She reached out and grabbed Dani’s hand to stop her from picking one up. “And please don’t touch them.”
“Oh, sorry,” Dani said.
“I’m sorry,” Perfect said, letting go of her. “When I was younger, people used to try to take my bunnies away. Even now that I’m on my own, I’m a little bit paranoid about that.”
“Oh,” Dani said. “I sometimes played with things I wasn’t supposed to, too.”
“Like that?” Perfect asked, pointing at the ring.
“What, this?” Dani said. She laughed nervously and twisted it around on her finger. “Maybe I should have been more careful with it, but… I was actually talking about dolls. My sister’s, I mean.”
“She didn’t like to share?”
“Something like that,” Dani said uncomfortably. “Um… were you talking about robot DNA with these bunnies?”
“No, I wasn’t talking to them… I was thinking out loud,” Perfect said. “And as I explained to the professor, robots don’t have DNA. Neither do Portaliens, strictly speaking, though they do have an analogous genetic structure in their cells.”
“Portaliens?” Dani asked.
“I’m trying to crack the language their robot probes use,” Perfect said. “It’s just… an idea that stuck in my head. But it’s tricky, because they use trinary code of some kind, and we don’t even know if that’s a low-level machine code, or their actual language being modulated somehow. So, it isn’t even just a matter of translating an alien language… it’s also figuring out the encoding, compression algorithms, et cetera.”
“Oh,” Dani said. “What’s that got to do with DNA?”
“Nothing,” Perfect said. “That’s what I was telling… myself. The Portalien genes use four chemical compounds that function roughly the same as the nucleotides in our DNA. Four, not three. I thought that if I could figure out why they use three tones for transmission, it could be a clue for cracking it… so I’ve been going over what we know about the Portaliens themselves, the actual organic race, and trying to read between the… read… between…”
Her eyes had stopped focusing on Dani, and she mouthed the words “read between the lines” a few times, then turned and faced the circle of long-eared toys and opened her mouth… then turned back to Dani, sheepishly, and said, “Um, would you mind clearing out of the lab? I’ve got a lot of work to do, and it could get… messy.”
“Oh, sure,” Dani said. “I just wanted to watch some TV.”
Perfect didn’t quite manage to contain her stream of ideas long enough for Dani to leave the basement, and as she headed for the stairs she heard, “Don’t you see? What’s between the lines? Blank space. People who couldn’t read code often assumed that the hidden meaning was in the spaces, so they’d try to literally read… well, that’s beside the point. The gaps in the transmission aren’t gaps, they’re…” and then she was cut off by the door.
Perfect talked to bunnies… about robots and aliens. Dani wasn’t going to judge. There were weirder things in the world.
Anyway, sooner or later, she’d probably find out Dani’s secret. People who live in glass houses, and all that.
“Wh… where am I?” Dr. Clevenger asked. Her eyes found their focus, though the scene before her made little sense for a moment… and then she realized she was looking sideways at the legs of her chair and computer desk. “What happened?” she asked, as it registered that she was on the floor.
She pulled herself up on the chair. She wasn’t weak physically, but a little dizzy… it felt like her head had been beaten with a crowbar while somebody told her that everything she’d ever cherished had died and turned to dust.
Well, that much isn’t true, she thought. I’m still here.
She remembered what she had been doing, and she wheeled around to the spot where Rhyme had been restrained… where she was still restrained. Dr. Clevenger hadn’t been injured in an escape, it seemed.
“You,” she said. “What happened?”
“You’re the scientist,” Rhyme said. “All I know is you looked at the computer screen, exclaimed, ‘Yes! The secret of immortality is mine!’, and then you stood up really quickly and… fell.”
Was it that simple? Euphoria and a head rush leading to a light swoon, and possibly a blow to the head on the way down? It was within the realm of possibility. She’d have to give herself a thorough examination and watch for signs of concussion… after she very calmly, very carefully verified the results.
She sat down at the computer. Left idle, it had blanked the screen and locked itself. She typed in her password and hit enter… and then screamed until she passed out.
“How long are you going to let her keep doing that?” Spinnerette asked Webmistress as they watched Dr. Clevenger collapse again. It was the third time it had happened since Spinnerette checked in on her, after several hours with no word from the lab and no progress logged in the file system.
“Maybe just one more time,” Webmistress said. “Then you go tell her to get back to work. I don’t pay people to sleep on the job.”
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