Reconfigure (12 page)

She checked the time on her computer, it was still early, 8:32am. The hustle and bustle of rush hour and various school runs were going on outside. It was muffled by her double glazing but impossible to ignore. She selected herself on her phone again. She was already selected from her test Translate but this had to be done absolutely correctly. She was not going to risk a drag and drop but instead typed in the numbers. She had made an alteration of just a few units less on the y direction and adjusted the z to 25.0. Hitting the Apply button she was surprised to still be in her office. She looked at the phone and the warning made her take a deep breath in and a sigh of relief out. There was a physics warning. It appeared in a UI dialogue box

“Physics engine limits of tolerance, Object Intersection”

She hit Cancel. Roisin adjusted the z to 25.2 and tried the same Translate again. It was a hunch, but she felt she could experiment with the RC safety exceptions protecting her.

To blink and be presented with a completely different view to the one she had just a moment ago was confusing. Equally confusing was an instant tickle of cold morning air on her face. Though the real shock to the system was finding herself falling. Her feet hit the soft grass but her body was still rigid from standing tall in her office. If felt like a step backwards off a kerb. Her brain had no way of telling if the ground was near or if this was a life threatening drop from a cliff. Her nervous system did what everyone’s would do. It sent a wave of confused panic to everything. The jolt of the ground rippled through her legs, hips and chest and caused her teeth to crash together on impact. It was not really any different in height to a regular staircase step. Roisin gathered her senses. That was a shock. Her heart was now racing. She knew from her test Translate that it felt a little weird but no major consequences. This had shaken her up. The damp grass was soft and inviting but she would rather her body had not tipped her backwards, so that her jeans could soak up some of the morning dew. The fall was a little more controlled. After the initial confused impact her muscles and balance system worked out what might be happening.

Roisin now felt not only shocked, slightly damp and cold, but embarrassed. It was like she had attempted an awesome skateboard trick and missed her landing and landed on her backside. No one saw this trick, at least that was what she hoped. She stood up, pushing into the grass with one hand, which she then wiped down her trousers leaving a darker colour smear.

She was in the middle of the lawn. The house and its patio door recognisable from the photos she had discovered. There were tall wooden fences to her left and to her right. The garden was strewn with primary colours. She could see a red bodied and yellow roofed Little Tikes car with its shopping trolley style wheels twisted at 45 degrees. A small football nestled into the grass like a bright orange egg. A jigsaw of foam panels formed what looked like hopscotch, the numbers standing out in bright green on the darker red tiles. Roisin navigated the minefield of toys towards the house keeping to the fence to the right. Each house was on the curve of the road. The house to the left faced away slightly more. The fence would keep her out of view of anyone on the right who might just happen to look out of the window and see a strange girl sat on the lawn having appeared out of nowhere!

As her brain tuned into the situation she heard a lot of voices. They were coming from the street, a barrage of shouting and “this way”, “over here.” She set her Zone range a few units more than the default and ran a scan with FMM and saw a huge collection of cubes just the other side of the house appear on her screen. They were all labelled Human, with their own individual suffix number. There were also a large number of other devices showing, cameras mostly. It was difficult to make it all out as every cube was competing with every other cube. It was quite a crowd.

She had seen enough secret agent films and played enough tactical espionage that she knew the moves to mimic. She sidled to the patio door. She popped her head around with a very rapid nod to look through, pulling back almost instantly, then doing it again. A spy style double take. There was no real point, she could see through walls and the scan had shown no humans in the house. They were all out front, there were two cubes separate from the pile of competing cubes. She highlighted them for movement tracking. They were very close together and looked ready to be absorbed by the collection in front of them. Roisin slid the patio door across and stepped inside, closing it behind her.

She stood in a stylishly decorated and furnished dining room. A complex tangled light fitting hung over a light oak table. The room was open plan and led to what looked like the lounge via a wide arch. Net curtains covered the bay window on the front of the house but Roisin could see lots of people all clamouring and focused towards the front door. She could make out boom mikes and camera lenses and the odd flash of light all competing for the same piece of the World. The Paparazzi? She pondered to herself what would happen if she ran some sort of Attach or Join. Would the paparazzi become a cartoon cloud of dust with arms, legs and camera lenses in all directions blowing around the place? Clearly Faith was having her 15 minutes of fame. As Roisin made her way to the stairs, the front door was slightly ajar and she could hear the occasional protestation of a woman’s voice.

“It honestly wasn’t a camera trick.” She said.

“Can you get him to giggle again?” Said a much gruffer voice.

As she climbed the stairs checking out the decor, Roisin thought about the meme. Most of the reaction had been to the kid giggling, to the very real look of delight and that infectious laugh. That seemed to be what the paps were after. Faith was trying to tell them the boat really did just appear. The hacks were not interested in camera tricks. They did that sort of thing all the time. It would be easier for the kid to just smile and save their graphics team a few hours Photoshopping the pictures. Roisin appeared to be in agreement with her own, take care and do the right thing, part of her brain for a change. Just hearing Faith try and explain it was real must mean she would want to prove it. Faith would be searching and sharing more footage or images, which is what Roisin was here to stop.

The top floor office was pretty much what Roisin expected. Not least because the complete inventory of the room had appeared in her FMM scan. There was a computer, it was a laptop with the screen up. A Macbook Pro, not unlike her own. Roisin moved a finger over the trackpad. Just to make sure it was not going to suddenly drop into a screen saver. Next to the machine, as predicted by FMM was a camera. It was a standalone camera, a slightly old fashioned concept. Roisin only ever used her phone camera. She lifted it up and looked at the screen. The weight of the lens pulling it down slightly. It was not a huge piece of equipment but the centre of balance was very different to just holding a phone. Roisin found a power switch and pressed it. The universal circle with a line pointing up icon making this much easier to locate. The camera screen showed the room in front of it wobbling about as Roisin moved it around to find the review button. Again a universally known ‘filled in right facing triangle in a box’ helped here. A matrix of still images appeared. A block of the images were of a similar tone and colour, as she scrolled back they changed to what seemed to be night time shots. She started back towards the lighter thumbnails. Even without zooming in she saw there were lots of shots of a play park, of a boy and his dad, then of a yacht in his hands. They were all stills and closeups. Next was a video, she hit play and saw the father and son launching their boat on the pond. A little push and the yacht created a mini wave that rippled to the edge of the pond, tickling a few ducks on the way past. Then another still, this time of triumphant hands in the air. It was a wide shot and just to the left on a bench Roisin saw herself. Not in focus but she was there, phone in hand, the cartoon bag colours obvious. She hit delete. “Sorry.” She thought, “Great picture, but I can’t risk it." The camera asked for confirmation, which she gave, and moved onto the next shots. She appeared in no more images. She got to the now famous giggling kid video and re-watched it. This time this was at source, the real one, not a YouTube clone. It was funny and sweet. It was also identical to the online version. Faith had not cut it or kept anything that might lead to Roisin. She turned the camera off and placed it back next to the machine.

Now for the computer, the Photo application was already open. She went to the most recent imports and quickly identified the offending image and trashed it. She emptied the trashcan too to be sure. It deleted a few more files that had been languishing in there too. Roisin thought that was enough payment for the lost photo in helping free some space and do some OS maintenance for Faith. She checked which of the many cloud services were running in the top bar, as well as iCloud. It seemed Faith was running the all encompassing Flickr uploader. Any picture at any time would be sucked up to their servers and marked as private. The uploader already had authentication to Flickr in place so it was easy to just log into the webpage. There in the private camera roll was the ‘her in the background’ photo. She trashed it there too.

Her work here was done. She closed the browser window and made the computer’s desktop and the real desktop look as much like they had when she arrived. She heard the front door slam shut and a soothing maternal voice trying to calm a distraught child a few floors down. She guessed he had not giggled for the cameras.

Roisin looked at the two human cubes, the tracking had kicked in. She did a refresh of the entire area, one final scan. It seemed another collection of cubes and equipment had arrived. Two rows of four with two more to the left of them. It looked like a vehicle was arriving. More paps on a minibus? Except the surrounding equipment was very different. The hairs on the back of Roisin’s neck rippled. There were cubes labelled Firearm. She hit her panic filter button, it showed ten knifes brightly on the screen, neatly arranged in rows just as the Human cubes had been.

Roisin crouched and peeked out of the window towards the front of the house. A dark black military style van had arrived out front and its contents were pouring out. There were no markings on the van, it just looked rock hard and dangerous. The people getting out did so with a smooth well practiced identical manner one after the other. She could not make out the exact style of gun they carried amongst their other tactical equipment, but they were definitely sub machine guns. Pistol holsters were strapped in identical places on each one of their legs. They streamed towards the cloud of paps and the front door. Another man stepped out, slightly more slowly, but no less deliberately from the front passenger seat. He barked “Secure the Area."

She expected the paps to turn their clicking towards this unmarked collection of military might. Instead they all lowered their cameras and clicked off their recording equipment. So much for journalistic freedom she thought. Whoever had turned up were pretty hardcore. The new arrivals were fast and deliberate, they were already opening the front door, aggressively, and heading at the two cubes inside the house on her FMM screen. She heard Faith screaming at them to stop, and a little voice cry for his mum.

Something in Roisin felt a wave of guilt. Armed shady military personnel were descending upon this family for some reason. Maybe they were in some sort of witness protection and had foolishly broken cover posting viral video on the Web? No! No amount of fantasising was going to get around the fact that this was her fault. Translating that boat at them? What was she thinking? Maybe someone thought that it wasn’t a camera trick after all? What Roisin could do was valuable to any number of people good and bad.

Two of the armed men pointed their guns towards the mother and child, whilst two more covered one another checking the ground floor before joining the other four headed for the stairs. Outside the pap cloud slowly walked away trying not to see what was happening. The squad commander approached the doorway, ignoring the screaming woman and distraught child. He glanced around the hallway.

This was not going to happen. Roisin could just Translate home, the soldiers would never know she was there. That, would be wrong, she told herself. She needed to help Faith. She selected and bookmarked the two cubes who she knew were currently being surrounded and in some form of distress. The cube view was great but did not give her all the subtlety of being there. She could hear on the floor below boots and webbing moving around checking each room with tactical precision. She reached for the camera, started it recording and then Translated it down to somewhere near the distressed cubes. The Commander thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye, turned to look but there was nothing. Roisin had translated the camera back after a fraction of a second. It was enough to see a badly framed video, in a few frames, of Faith hugging and protecting her crying son, tears streaming down her own face.

Roisin swiped the two bookmarked cubes out to the same coords she had arrived at with a Translate. The soldiers and the Commander only took a fraction of a second to kick out of the mode of ‘bemused human how could that happen?’ They were back into serious operational mode.

Roisin Translated herself, setting her position just a meter closer to the house, ready for any height drop this time. She turned and bent down to look at Faith and her son. Faith was silent and agog.

“Quick get behind the shed.” Roisin told them.

The suggested course of action coming to her as she had turned and seen the shaded corner of the garden. Faith nodded and still clutching her crying child ran the few meters to the gap behind the shed.

Roisin followed. Hitting refresh on FMM as they scuttled to the hiding place.

Inside the house six squad members shouted “Clear!” They were unaware of what had happened downstairs. Only hearing the frantic barking of orders to, “Find Them! Now!” followed by radio clicks and “Sir!"