TR Vanguard - Part Five

"The patch just isn't taking, Mil. Even with the override codes you gave me, her core systems won't let this code take root."

"Give it another try, Joule." Mil took a bite from the taco plate he'd bought from the place just below them and continued to watch out the window. The meat was too greasy to be synth, but he tried not to think about that. He kept his mind on the time and his eyes on the street.

"Dammit, Mil. I was supposed to go dancing tonight. I've got friends waiting on me. Hot friends, Mil.  Hot. Friends. Do you think I dress this way to eat greasy Mexican food and fix broken sex robots?"

"Thanks, by the way." Adri was stretched out face-down on Joule's bed. Her dress was unzipped to below her shoulder blades and a bit of her skin, about the size of a half-dollar, had been carefully cut away from her spine to allow access to her diagnostic port.

"Yeah, yeah." Joule bit her thumbnail and re-ran the installation procedures from her tablet. Mil could be a stubborn old bastard sometimes, but she didn't want to lose him as a regular. She knew he would put up with her complaints for a while but she didn't want to risk pushing him away. He paid too good.

A few minutes later, a generic looking sedan that might have been dark blue or dark green pulled up to Joule's third floor balcony. Mil put down the remains of his taco plate and stepped outside. The door slid back revealing an empty cockpit, empty save for a small suitcase sitting on the seat. Mil grabbed it and brought it inside.

Joule's tablet beeped at her. "Failed again, Mil. Want me to run it again?" She drummed her fingers on the screen and rolled her head back to stare into the darkness.

"No need. The car's here and that means we're out of time." Mil opened the suitcase and pulled out a change of clothes for Adri which he put on the bed at her feet and a change of clothes for himself. "Adri, you'll just have to wait for me here. Once I make the drop I'll come back and we'll figure out what to do then."

"Mil, don't you dare try to leave me again. Joule, would you check my schematics and tell me where my network antenna is located?"

Joule did a search of the document. "It's in your left arm and runs from the base of your wrist to just above your elbow." Joule used her finger to trace the path of the antenna on Adri's arm.

"Fine then. I don't need two arms tonight. We'll take the left one off at the shoulder and get a replacement when things cool down."

Joule flipped the page. "And there's a redundant backup in your right hand, from the tip of the pinky to the base of the wrist."

Mil sat down on the edge of the bed. "Look, Adri, I don't want to leave you behind any more than you want to be left behind. But lets not go lopping off limbs, okay? I promise I won't be long and I will be back as fast as I can. If you don't want to hang out in Joule's apartment, you can wander the burgo. There's about five and a half city blocks here all bordered by small canals. Don't cross the water and your network antenna won't be picked up, okay?" A little voice in Mil's head reminded him that he was comforting a robot. He told the voice to shush and mind its own business.

Joule wrinkled her nose and flipped a few more pages. "There might be one more option. I'm looking at the 'low power' settings. It appears that I can designate her wireless networking system as 'low priority'. That will cause it to turn her link off if and when her power levels drop below thirty percent."

Adri's eyes lit up. "Oh! What's my power level at now?"

"Eighty seven percent."

Adri slumped.

Mil sighed. "After all we've been through tonight? Adri, you'd have to spend two days swimming laps around this whole burgo to get your power levels down that low."

"Or we could take out four of her five rechargeable power cells. From the sound of it, she can go a long way on just twenty percent. They'd be easy to take out, too. It'd be messy since we don't have the right tools to cut her skin and we'd have to be careful about the coolant lines that run near the cells. But once we had her open the cells themselves are meant to be hot swapped. We're probably looking at five minutes tops for the whole deal."

Adri's wide-eyed animation was back. "Well, what are we waiting for?"

Mil threw his hands up in silent frustration and stood up.

"Okay, but let's move to the shower for this, okay guys? If she pops a line, I don't want this apartment to stink of robot coolant for the rest of my life. And, Mil, you can come do the cutting. I'm am not getting this outfit dirty. As soon as you fools are gone, I'm out the door."


Adri kept dozing off. When they were talking or when she was actively looking around at the city, she was just fine. But once the rain started and the view disappeared, she started slipping into cat-naps every few minutes. It was likely just some form of power saving function kicking in, but it was making Mel nervous.

"Where are we now, Mel?" Adri was awake again and holding her abdomen where they'd made the cuts. The rain hadn't let up much, but the traffic they were in was low altitude and close enough to the walls for her to take in the colonial-Gothic architecture of the area.

"We're in the Flores Vermelhas burgo. We'll be at the airport, and the drop point, in about half an hour. Once we're there, I may need to you take the wheel for a bit. I've never met this buyer before and I'll be happier if we're ready to go on a moment's notice. So maybe get some more sleep before then?"

"Okay, Mel. Good idea." Adri slid back down in her seat, eventually falling back to sleep once they passed over the canal into the Geulaendeu Silheom burgo. Apparently the twenty-meter tall advertisements for personal electronics and custom tea flavors wasn't as eye-opening to her as sky scrapers designed to look like homes and temples from millenniums' past.

Traffic in Geulaendeu Silheom was always thick and today was no exception. Bored with the simplicity of the drive, Mil let the controls fold in and and the car went into autodrive mode.


Mil let his mind drift and his eyes wander across the vast field of advertisements. Although there was a lot of repetition some of them could be entertaining.

One in particular caught his eye. At first he only noticed it because it was being played on a continuous loop in so many locations; wherever he looked there it was. Then he though it was strange for its simplicity. Most of the advertisements in this burgo were flashy with bright colors, but this one was simple. Ostensibly it was an advertisement for a drama serial. A geisha sat on a rice mat with a shamisen on her lap. She spoke to the camera as sub-titles carried her words to the commuters below. "You don't know what you've taken from me. Don't believe the lies you've been told. I'm begging you to look inside and make the right choice." A spash-screen came up informing the viewer that the unnamed show would be broadcasting soon and then the short would repeat itself.

Mil watched the ad roll past a dozen times. Something about it was bothering him. Suddenly, he jerked up in his seat fast enough to startle Adri. "What's wrong. Are we there, Mil?"

"Adri. Look over there. Do you see the advertisement with the geisha? Who is that? Who is the actress in that ad? Do you recognize her?"

Adri watched the ad just once before she spun and looked Mil right in the eyes. "Mil, that's Sapphire Jay!"

Mil pulled the old red vbox out of his pocket and stared at it. Look inside and make the right choice, she said. She must have been referring to the files in the vbox.

"Mil, put it away. Sapphire Jay is not a nice person. She's not above using circular code as part of her security."

Adri was right to be worried. If Sapphire or Timoteus had used any form of trap code as part of the security for this vbox, any unauthorized user could be seriously injured just by logging into it. But something told him that wasn't the case. Timoteus was a well known pacifist and everything about their history together said that Sapphire was genuinely in love with him. Mil couldn't believe that she would adulterate anything that was part of that history.

Mil extended one of the port cables from the vbox. "Adri, I've been told that this is Timoteus Reed's musical journal. The one he used his whole career and the same one he was using when his band's plane crashed. If that's true, then it's nothing but a big file of musical notation from a young idealist and we can safely cash in on moving it from one collector to another. If it's really something else, then we need to know what it is before we can decide what to do with it."

Adri opened her mouth to object but then bit her lip instead. "Okay, Mil. But just ten seconds, right? If it's nothing but music files you should know in ten seconds. After that, I'm pulling you out."

"Thirty seconds. And if I'm not out by then, you take my commpen and call Celeste. She's a good friend and she'll know what to do."

Mil plugged the vbox into the port at the base of his neck and waited for the system to boot. If a heads-up display of file folder names came across his vision he'd be okay. If it was anything else...


Ah hell, it was a trap after all.

Mil looked around at the illusion the vbox was generating for him. It was really high rez and incredibly detailed. Despite the hot water he was in, he couldn't help but be impressed by it.

He was sitting on a wooden bench overlooking a vibrant jungle valley. The sun was high in the sky and warm on his skin. He could hear tropical birds singing and insects humming. He was wearing a simple one-piece robe that felt like silk and whose buttons appeared to be hand crafted from old bone. Turning on the bench, he saw an elaborate house made of teak and bamboo with clay roof tiles the color of malachite.

"Well at least Sapphire made it a pretty trap."

"Sure, Sapphire made it, but I've never really thought of it as a trap before. Thirsty?" A little man wearing the same kind of robe jingled a glass of ice tea at Mil.

"Are you... are you supposed to be Timoteus Reed?" Mil stared at the avatar in the doorway. He was bearded and had much longer hair than in those days, but if Reed had survived that plane crash and retired to live out his life in an idyllic mountain retreat, Mil imagined he'd look exactly like this.

"Yeah, man that's me. Come in out of the sun, brother. It get's really hot during the day. I was just sitting down to have a bite to eat."

Mil accepted the glass of illusory tea and followed the Reed-avatar inside. There was no door to keep out the heat, but the floor was made out of large slabs of marble that cooled his feet. Each end of the long building was open to the elements, allowing a cool breeze to drift though.

Reed walked past a table covered in fresh cut fruit and gestured an invitation to get comfortable. He continued on to a chair with a guitar sitting by it. "Man, it's been a real long time since I've had a visitor other than Sapphire. I mean, I'm what you might normally call a hermit, right? But company is nice once in a while. Hey, wanna hear something I've been working on?"

Mil watched the old-Reed avatar closely. It was really impressive. Was this some kind of tribute that Sapphire had built to Timoteus? "Actually, I'm kind of curious; if you don't mind me asking, does Sapphire Jay visit you regularly?"

"Yeah, man. Sapphie visits about once a month. Sometimes she brings a guest or two, but usually it's just her. I mean, that's like, once a month for me, right? It's about once a week in her time. She's cool about giving me my space."

"'Her time'? You mean you...?"

"Yeah, brother, I know I'm in a vbox. Been dead for twenty-odd years now, haven't I?" Reed smiled and strummed softly on his guitar. "Sapphie doesn't know you're here, does she? Are you up to no good, brother?"

"No, she doesn't. And yeah, I've been contracted to obtain your vbox for a client."

"So you're a thief?"

"Yeah."

"That's not cool, man. You should bring the box back to Sapphie. I'm guessing your client isn't going to be as accommodating about my privacy, you know? Say, do you play any instruments?"

"No, I... So, Sapphire programmed you to know that Timoteus Reed is dead? That you're dead? I'm sorry, I know I'm repeating myself, but I'm having a little bit of a hard time understanding what's going on here."

Reed placed his guitar back on the marble and leaned forward. "It's like this; Back in the day when we were touring, this was my escape-place. Sapphie designed it for me. At first it was just how we talked about what we wanted to do when we retired. Then it became the place where I was comfortable writing and meditating. I could log in at breakfast, spend a week being by myself, and then back with the band before a lunchtime rehearsal."

"Then one day it occurred to me that'd I'd been here a really long time and that I couldn't unplug. Man, that was a dark time. It was nearly a year before Sapphie came to visit me. She told that I was dead and she had recovered my vbox with the wreckage."

"So, like, am I glitch in the vbox; just an attempt to keep the avatar going when no one told it to stop? Or am I a memory of myself, something that's only here to keep Sapphie happy when she's had a bad week? Who the fuck knows, man. Life is strange, that's all I know."

Mil leaned back and absent-mindedly took a bite of fruit. It was cold and sweet. If he didn't know any better he would swear that he was eating real fruit in a real house on a real mountain.

"So, you're saying that Sapphire designed this place, but that you just never left it, is that right?"

"That about sums it up, brother. Boggles the mind, doesn't it?" Timoteus leaned back and started playing his guitar again.  This time Mil let him play it all the way through without interrupting him. It was really good. Like any good song played by a great artist, Mil could hear the emotion in the notes. That was something he'd never heard in computer generated music before today.

Once the song was over, Mil wiped the fruit from his hands. "I should be going. Is there a trick to bringing up an interface?"

"Yeah, brother. Just say 'it's time to get back to work.' Good luck to you, brother. I suspect you've got a tough decision to make."

"It's time to get back to work." The HUD that Mil expected when he first logged in appeared in the air in front of him. He scrolled down until the option to log out appeared.

The house faded out and the interior of the car faded back in.

"Mil? Are you okay? I was about ready to call your friend Celeste." Adri reached behind him and gently unplugged the vbox for him.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay. Take the wheel, will you? There's an address on Bosun street in the nav. Let's go get you fixed up properly. Give me the commpen, will you?"

Mil dialed. "Celeste? I'm sorry, love. False alarm. The vbox I got from Sapphire Jay is fake. There's nothing in it. Nope, not even something for the gossip pages. It's garbage. Yeah, sorry Celeste. Give me a call when you get something new though, would you? I've run up some hefty expenses on this job and now I've got nothing to show for it."

Mil glanced over at Adri. "Well, almost nothing."