The Weapon - Lex - part 21
By Diana the Valkyrie
Downloading Wendy
Update: 05/11/2003 to valkyrie05


The next day, Ms Cattermole's voice interrupted me as I was cleaning out the
security logs. You have to scrub them out quite frequently, otherwise they
build up and overflow all over the place. It's one of the more unpleasant jobs
for a farmer. "Follow me, Templeton," she said, so I dropped what I was doing
and dogged her footsteps.

We went to Conference Room D, and sat down. I was kind of hoping ... and yes!
In came some grey guy, and the Guardian. She was wearing a white tunic, white
skirt, gold belt, with a big W across her front. And a white cape. Leather
gloves and boots, she looked sexier than Sandy Gentle, which is saying
something, I can tell you. And her wings, she still had her wings, but they
were folded behind her back, sticking up and out a bit, above her head by a
foot or two. My eyes were practically bugging out, but Ms Cattermole's sharp
voice soon brought be down to earth. "Get busy, Templeton," she said.

I pulled out my mobile, mated it to one of the main servers, then to the grey
guy's mobile. First, I blued over to his phone, all the stuff that Ms
Cattermole had listed. Then I blued all the stuff that he'd brought, over to
the main server, so Ms Cattermole would be able to browse through it. Piece of
cake. "Now her," said Ms Cattermole, pointing to the Guardian. "Her what?" I
asked, feeling a bit stupid. She didn't seem to have a mobile like everyone
else has.

She smiled at me, and I felt my face get hot and my toes begin to curl.
"Goeff," she said, and my toes totally curled. "Geoff, just assume that I have
a mobile, tell yours to do a scan, and mate it up to a node called "Wendy".
That's me." "That's your mobile?" "I don't have a mobile, I just emulate one."

Oh wow. I'd heard about this, she could induce electric currents in a wire.
Well, anyone with a magnet can do that. But she could do it very precisely,
and what she was saying was that she could conform to the Bluetooth protocols
without needing any manufactured equipment.

So I did what she said, and sure enough, my mobile could see a device called
"Wendy", the icon was an angel with wings. So I mated to that, and when I
looked up, she smiled and winked at me. "We're mated. Ready to receive?" she
asked. "Uh, yeah," I replied.

A Bluetooth link will give you a terabit if you have the version eight
protocols. Not that I'd ever seen data flow at that speed, even over a
superconductor link. So this was the first time for me, and it was like
getting blasted by a fire hose. My mobile filled up in about a second, then it
started dumping down to the main server. But it couldn't talk to the main
server at a terabit rate, so it was waitabiting to the Guardian while it got
itself cleared. Even so, data was flowing real fast. And then the main server
filled up, it crashed, that crashed my mobile, and I looked at the Guardian.
"Yes, I know," she said, smiling innocently.

"What? What?" said Ms Cattermole. "Uh," I said. "How long is this going to
take, I don't have all day," she snapped. I looked at the Guardian while my
mobile rebooted; I could mate it to another server, get the flow going again.
"How much more is there," I asked. She smiled. "You just got under one second,
there's three months of data." I punched a few keys. "Uh. About twenty five
years." "What?" "It's going to take me twenty five years to download all this
data. And we don't have enough space on all the main servers to put it."

"WHAT THE FUCK?" Ms Cattermole shouted at me. This was scary; she could get me
fired, even though none of this was my fault. "I did tell you there would be
rather a lot," said the Guardian, "what did you expect you silly cow, a few
pieces of paper?"

Ms Cattermole turned her fury away from me, onto the Guardian. "HOW DARE YOU!"
she yelled, "we'll see about this, you're sabotaging the discovery, that's
contempt of court." She stood up, stalked out, and slammed the door after her.
I looked at the Guardian and the grey guy; they looked at me. "Well, at least
it isn't you she's angry with," said the Guardian, "would anyone like a
coffee?"

She floated over to the sideboard by the wall, and came back with cups of
coffee for each of us. Somehow, she knew that I liked a lot of milk and sugar.
I sipped it, it tasted good, and helped drive the memory of a furious
Cattermole away. I think she deliberately diverted Cattermole's anger away
from me onto herself. "How did you know ..." I asked. "Geoff, if every time I
do something that surprises you, you ask me how I do it, I'll be spending
hours just explaining stuff to you. I phoned Sally Hambington, asked her, she
told me, simple. OK?" "But you don't have a ..., oh, no, you don't need a
phone, so you?" She smiled. I decided not to ask how she'd made three cups of
coffee without using a kettle.

"So how can I download all this data from you," I said, thinking out loud. She
smiled at me and fluttered her eyelashes. "Maybe a superconductor, cat 7
cable? But what would we plug it into," I wondered, looking at her. "Not on
your Nellie," she retorted, "you use terablue or nothing."

The grey guy had been a silent audience up till now, I'm not sure what he was
there for. And now he stood up. "I need to examine what I got here. Coming
Wendy? Kittens to rescue?" She shook her head, and he left. "What did he mean
about kittens?" I asked. "Oh, it's cape joke," she said, "like all I ever do
is rescue kittens stuck in trees." "You do look great in that cape." She
swirled it a bit. "It looks even better in flight, it fans out like a delta
wing on a jet fighter." "And those wings, oh man, are they cool or what? But I
thought you used antigrav or something, why the wings?"

She sat down again at the table, and scooted her chair up towards me.
"Actually, the wings don't do anything, they're just for dramatic effect.
Makes me look a bit like ..." "An angel!" "Which I am not, of course." "Close
enough for government work, you're our Guardian Angel, aren't you?" "Well,
yes. Sort of. I mean, if anything really dreadful were to happen, I'd put a
stop to it. And I also get kittens out of trees." I laughed.

"Hey, thanks for diverting Cattermole's temper, she's pure poison, that one.
She'd get me fired just for practice." "Practice?" "Practice in being evil.
No, I think you might have just saved my job, Guardian of Humanity." "Call me
Wendy." "Uh. Wendy."

It felt strange. She looks like a girl, apart from the wings. She talks like a
girl, she smells like a girl - lavender, I think. But she isn't a girl. She's
four black holes, I've read that. And everything is emulated. Or faked, to be
more honest. But you forget that when you look at her, when she talks, when
she moves.