Off Topic
Probably still in Chicago down deep and working with his people.
The park was full of fresh air that smelled of dew just starting to form. Her meeting contact would be jacked in on an orange bench. There. A cloaked figure. Plasticene sweatshirt. Virtch eyes tinted pink. Slouched. Hair flowing over one cheek. It was a kid, like they all were these days. Superheroedom has always been a young person's world, but Heidi didn't care. Hellscape was riding again and it felt amazing (editor's note...Use the Forum Search, Luke). She slipped through the ether, quad-checking the connections that would crash her back home if a bit flipped wrong. When she got to the bench, she sat close enough to the kid she could smell the essence of electric juniper seeping through the jacks.
Heady.
She could see why Xityheads became addicted to it.
Not for her, though. She liked real sunlight too much. And Jose, too. Dogface, he still liked to be called. She liked him too much to go deep like these kids today. She smiled at that. Jose was a good man. In retrospect, it was obvious they would be together. The guy had a heart of gold and nerves of steel. Two of the three things she demanded of a man. That he still had a knucklecurve to die for was the third.
"You have the list," Hellscape sent.
The contact raised one finger. The nail was painted with a kaleidoscope of fractals.
She scraped the protocol and ran the dataline into her own system, confirming sums as they arrived.
Nine names. Nine boot loading programs that came from labs even Westy may not know he was funding. That's what Jose had said, though Heidi thought that was just to protect her. She had met P. Moreau Westmoreland more than once and knew it was a losers game to think he was unaware of what went on in the technologies he funded. Clones. Multi-chained intellect. Cross-quantum communications. All his. Hell, she wouldn't put it past him to have fingers on both sides of the exchange.
When the dataline ran clear, she disconnected.
Stood.
Slipped out of the park, fully cognizant of the privacy protocols that lined the tube out. Clenching her hand here in the virtch, she felt the sources, filmy in against the full representation of her skin. Biocodes. She would transfer each to physical, load them into the escorts Marie Manning had asked for, the escorts for the Nine players who would be on the Krill Karavan this off season -an operation that from the outside was a simple fan outreach program, but that in the end would be so much more.
Baseball players on world tours got access, after all. They got invitations to places others didn't.
When Heidi was finished with her work, though, Marie Manning, too, would have access.
As would Hellscape, Heidi thought, emerging from Multiverse Xity to return to her high-security cave. She smiled, turning to the bank of sensors and processors along the far wall.
It was time to go to work.