Chapter Twenty Eight
I decided to close my eyes and then I must have gone to sleep because when I opened them up again it was dark outside the window and dark inside the room. There were still party noises coming from below so I guessed all the Juice people were still having their celebration. I didn't want to go back there so I sat up on the bed, crossed my legs, and pretended not to worry. But I worried. I let my mind wander and pretty soon it wandered into the weave and I followed the lines of communication from one room to the next, to the next and out onto the balcony and down along the stairs and into the courtyard and from there to the lobby and behind the front desk to the network operations center.
Once I was inside the NOC it was a simple matter to find the audio recordings that had come from inside my room and I instructed them to become nothing, and they became nothing. Then I rummaged around inside the files they had in there and found out things I didn't really want to know, like how much money it cost to supply the motel with water, and how often the video repairman had to come to fix the screens. I also learned the languages spoken by the general operating system and how it spent most of its time sorting through all the garbage it had only just created, moving bits and bytes from what it called Eden to what it called New Generation and then on to Survivor Space until eventually deleting everything. It was a very wasteful language, always taking back everything it said, crushing its very own words onto a heap that did nothing but grow and shrink and grow and shrink and shuffle pointless data around in the meantime.
I learned that the Juice Brothers were incorporated and paid their taxes in Delaware. I learned that they had branches overseas and made a lot of money selling jackets and shirts and stickers and that Lars Charles had his name on a lot of patents, but when you examined the papers more closely you saw that he had had nothing to do with the inventions themselves. There always seemed to be an element of coercion involved. He was always listed as “ad hoc” this and “ad hoc” that, usually an advisor or consultant and sometimes just plain “operator”.
The room had been correct in saying that everything was recorded, but oddly almost none of it was ever re-played. You could mark anything as if it had been re-played, and that made it much less likely that anyone would ever look at it, if my interpretation was correct. Only about four percent were viewed, and of that four percent, a mere one percent was marked as having been viewed twice. I thought this bit of knowledge might come in handy. If I managed to get out of there, I would, before I left the weave vicinity, make sure my escape had already been reviewed, maybe even more than once. They would think there was nothing on the tapes! If I managed to get out of there, that is.
I amused myself with this rummaging around on the network for quite some time, but my past-time was interrupted when the door opened, the lights came on, and into the room walked a very unsteady Kinship, accompanied by a teensy tiny old lady in a very pink bathrobe.
“Oh there you are,” Kinship stammered while supporting herself against the wall. Her eyes were red and she looked very sleepy.
“You can go now,” the old lady said, pushing past Kinship with a grimace on her face, as if she were displeased with her companion.
“I'll be right outside,” Kinship sloshed her words. “In case there's any you know like troubles,” she added.
“There will be no troubles,” the old lady said sharply, waving her hand around. “Just go. Leave us alone.”
Kinship left, and the old woman came slowly closer toward me, while pulling something silver and rectangular out of the front pocket of her bathrobe.
“Stupid cables,” she mumbled, digging into her pockets with her other hand before pulling out some long gray wires. She sat down on Kinship's bed, facing me, and attached the wires to some holes in the side of the metallic slab.
“Who are you?” I asked her.
“Ping Lee,” she said without looking up.
“Sorry?” I wasn't sure if she had said her name or issued an instruction or said something else entirely. I found it difficult to understand her words.
“My name is Ping Lee,” she snapped, looking at me now.
“Are you June Lee's mother?” I asked.
“No relation,” she said. “I am what they call the Breaker.”
“You?” I was truly shocked. “You're the Breaker? YOU are going to chop me into little pieces?”
“What pieces,” she said in her funny voice. “not break you. Code breaker. I break your code. The locks they put inside of you. We open you up, no? Unlock your potential.”
“Open me up?” I retreated to the far corner of my bed, against the corner of the wall. She was small but she was scaring the heck out of me. But she only laughed.
“You're so weird,” she said and I thought “I'm weird?”
“We're gonna put these clips on your fingers,” she said, holding out the ends of the gray wires. “Don't worry, it doesn't hurt. Just registers sensations so I can see the response. Look here,” she said, and turned the metallic tablet toward me so I could see it. I recognized it as the same kind of thing that was in Marta's garage, a smaller and lighter version of the computer.
“Hold out your hands,” she commanded, and I did.
“I always do what you people tell me to,” I said. “Why do I do that?”
“It's in your code,” she said.
“I don't understand,” I told her as she attached the clips to the tips of my index fingers.
“Follow your thoughts along the cables,”she instructed. “Let your mind go in. Close your eyes if you want to.”
I closed my eyes and did as she told me to, and soon I was inside the computer, and there it was again, that language, or a variation of it, a dialect, moving so quickly inside of the metal. There were teeny little parts and pathways inside it, and talk dashing around it, much much faster than the room and its weave, much more intensely too.
“Code as in words,” I must have spoken out loud because Ping Lee replied and said,
“Sometimes you have to see in another what there is in yourself.”
“I'm a computer,” I said, understanding fully for the first time in my life. “But not like your slab, not like a machine.”
“You're not a machine,” Ping Lee told me, “but you are a computer. Candles, this is what they call you, right?”
“It was never my name,” I replied. “Can you help me?” I asked her, but her answer was silence. “I don't trust anyone,” I continued.
“Wise child,” was all that she said.
“I was going to ask you some questions,” she said after a pause, “but it seems I don't have to. I can see you quite clearly while you're connected. I can feel you, too. That's so strange. That's so weird.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” I asked.
“It's so bizarre,” was her only reply. She kept me sitting there, connected by the fingertips, not speaking, barely making a sound, for what seemed like a very long time. When I tried to speak up she shushed me, and forbade me to talk until she told me I could. Outside of the room the party noise dwindled until it was gone. The streetlights outside of the window grew dim, and I imagined I could even see stars in the sky. It must have grown very late.
“That's so weird,” she muttered sometimes, except when she said “that's so strange” or “it's so bizarre.” Finally she stretched and stood up, disconnecting the clips from my fingers and stuffing the tablet back into her robe.
“Candles,” she said. “You don't need a Breaker. There is nothing to break. You are already free, only you don't know how.”
I didn't know what she meant, but for some reason I felt free to ask her if she could show me “how” but she simply shook her head and told me I would have to figure it out for myself.
“You're a computer,” she reminded me. “You were made for such as this. Now I have to go. I must give Mr. Charles my report, and then to sleep. I am very tired. I have come a long way.”
She bowed to me, then turned and left the room. I followed her to the door and peeked outside, where I saw Kinship sprawled out on the balcony, fast asleep and snoring loudly. She wasn't looking so “nice” now all crumpled up and wrinkly like that. No one else was on the balcony but the door slammed shut in my face, forcing me back into the room.