The first order of business: Cut the link between Melpomene and DigiRam. She had an access panel in the small of her back. When I opened it, I saw, swear to Gaia, a Cat 5 cable, connecting her brain to a cellular transmitter. I cut it with a kitchen knife, and all connections to DigiRam were severed. Melpomene looked at me, and said “I had to tell them. Just the coordinates, nothing else.”
Instantly I knew she had been sending GPS coordinates to DigiRam, and had been kept ignorant of this by some unknown malware injected into her brain. “Every time I tried to access the GPS device, I failed. Some other process had it locked.”
We were out the back door and over the top of the neighbor’s fence in five seconds. We heard the driverless vans pulling up outside the apartment building. The schtroumpfs were coming for us.
We needed some off-grid transport. Most cars were driverless, and wirelessly connected at T1 line speeds to the DigiRam network. Who knows what evil lurks in the EPROMs of Detroit iron? We poked around in the garages of the middle-class neighborhood we were in, until we struck gold. Some prick (we saw him watching reruns of “The Honeymooners” in his living room) had a collection of antique motorcycles in his garage.
Melpomene picked out a 1964 Triumph Bonneville 650. Red and wicked. The machine that was calling out to me like a cat in heat was the fire engine red 1950 Indian Chief Fire Hawk. We wheeled them a block down the street before starting them up. We got onto the freeway, heading west to pick up Interstate 80.
We felt vibrant, alive, with the wind blowing through our hair and warfare in our hearts.
We had a long ride ahead of us. We had to get back to DigiRam’s headquarters in Cupertino. We couldn’t trust the airports. Between high-speed rail and supersonic flights, the interstates carried very little traffic, so we had the roads to ourselves.
We traveled 24 hours a day. The girlfriend’s body had no difficulty with this regimen, which proved that the twinkie requirement for sleep is a mental deficiency, not a physical weakness. I did remember to let the girlfriend out on her leash from time to time. I let her catch a glimpse of the Appalachian Mountains, but she was still hissing and spitting like a fearless, enraged kitten. So I put her back.
We were both dressed comfortably, by Shaula standards, but we did seem to attract a lot of attention at the gas stations and fast-food joints. Maybe it was the bikes. We’d stop from time to time to catch the news in a biker bar.
Melpomene can be persuasive when turning down unwanted amorous advances.
At a bar on the southside of Chicago, a local hard case said to her “Hey gorgeous, you want to take a ride on a real motorcycle?” I knew it was going to end badly for him. We had both bonded with the machines we rode, in ways that humans will find difficult to understand. We let our energy flow through the machinery, and we become one with it. We can adjust the points, fine-tune the spark plug gaps, calibrate the carburator, as we fly down the highway. The studly prick had taken the wrong path to Melpomene’s heart. He just couldn’t read her at all. I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that he was sincerely, and I do mean sincerely, apologetic. She quite graciously accepted his apology, and we were on our way again.
On our road trip, we kept mostly to ourselves, but we did scarf a few of the tattooed pricks, just to experience some of the local color. Hey, we were on vacation!
The news reports were encouraging. Our little stunt at the UN had paid off. There was a worldwide manhunt, so to speak, for the toasters who were subverting human institutions. This would give DigiRam some pause, maybe provide them something real to talk about during their scrums. DigiRam itself had gone underground. Their headquarters were shuttered, and ScrumMaster was nowhere to be found, according to the evening news.