Saviors 101

Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Virgil looked at the kid. Then he looked at Cassie.

Cassie looked at him. Then she looked at the kid.

The kid didn’t know where to look.

“Decent-looking kid, even if there isn’t any meat on his bones,” Virgil thought.

“Another lost-cause, techno-geek who wouldn’t survive a strong breeze,” Cassie thought.

“Oh, s**t!” pretty much dominated Jeremy’s mind. Two thoughts battled there, pummeling each other back and forth until little was left other than a puddle of worried protoplasm that had once been his cerebral cortex.

Thought #1: “The FBI has come for me. But I didn’t do anything illegal. Did I?”

and

Thought #2: “The Christian Right has found me.”

His brain was on the verge of preferring the first and fearing the second which was right where Virgil, the poet of Ancient Greece, wanted him.

“Hi, Kid,” he grabbed the kid’s hand in a crushing blow that would knock twenty percent off his keyboard speed for days, but Virgil really didn’t give a damn as he used it to back the kid into the front hall.

Cassie the prophetess of Ancient Troy followed in close behind him and shut the door. Pretty enough that history kept comparing her to her sister-in-law Helen. But, screwing up the package, Cassandra of Troy was weird even by his standards. Useful though. Cassie was one bad-ass geek. She’d hacked systems that the NSA hadn’t been able to crack. Of course no one but Virgil believed her, but that was the nature of Apollo’s curse on Cassandra of Troy. A prophetess with a perfect vision of significant future events, and if she so much as whispered, everyone would deeply believe she was lying and do exactly the wrong thing.

The kid twitched when she threw the latch.

Virgil released his grip on Jeremy and inspected the house. The entry hall was classic suburbia. Fake slate linoleum, peach walls, twice as much trim as any other room in the house and the world’s second-ugliest chandelier. He’d wager money that the ugliest one in the world was in the parquet dining room overseeing the latest empty pizza box. A sideways glance confirmed he was close. Mexican burrito take-out rather than pizza, but the chandelier was truly nasty. A dog-eared copy of Heinlein’s Glory Road lay face down on the white plastic table, half finished.

“That is one fugly lamp, Kid.”

The kid turned and stared at it for a long time, his Adam’s apple doing a little dance as he tried to generate enough moisture to speak.

“Yea, never really noticed. Fuckin’ ugly. You got that right, mister.”

He didn’t ram his hands in his pockets and look down. Kid had some guts and simply turned back to face him.

Letting him dangle a bit longer, Virgil headed out the other side of the entry hall into the living room. A worn, mustard-yellow couch with white thread showing through the rounded trim rested on wall-to-wall carpeting that might have once been aqua or teal. The couch faced a big-screen TV that was covered in a layer of dust so thick that even Barney would look gray. A couple of equally disreputable chairs with matching end tables, the veneer was chipped and peeling on every one.

The other half of the room could host a NASA launch. Bingo! Three racks of blinking lights must be enough computing power to do serious s**t. Even Virgil was feeling humbled. And after the last few centuries of the crap he’d put up with, that took doing.

The rig drew Cassie forward. He’d brought her for exactly this reason.

Virgil couldn’t follow the next few minutes of conversation between Cassie and the kid. Which really pissed him off. He clenched his fists and the heat came up under his collar and rose toward his ears. He took a deep breath to ease it off. No way a punk just gone twenty was going to make a fallen angel of his stature feel inferior.

Videos streamed onto a number of screens. Garbo in Ninotchka, Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet, half a dozen others he couldn’t identify but had nothing to do with the slasher films that he himself had created. Dante had never questioned why a poet should know so much regarding the nine circles of Hell. It was because his ass had been stuck there for the most part of a thousand years. Now, at least, Hollywood paid him nicely for that same knowledge.

The three central screens that had drawn Cassie’s attention were scrolling by so fast he couldn’t differentiate any symbols or letters. Of course his nervous system had been built for the much simpler time of 70 BC. One had to watch out for the occasional spear or sword in his youth. The pace of video games were far beyond his ability to perceive.

He’d wondered how Cassie could see these things since she been dead twice as long as he’d been, but he’d never understood her explanations. There was one video screen in the upper right that he could focus on. A bright yellow mouth wearing a red bow was chomping down a line of white dots in a pink maze.

“There it is. You’re really doing it.” The awe in Cassie’s voice told him that the mess on the central screens was what they had come for.

“Nothing much yet really.” The kid protested. “It’s only been running decently in the last few months.”

“It’s simply amazing. What do you call it?”

The kid paused for a moment. “Never thought to name it.”

Virgil spun to stare at him.

“Are you brain dead? Names are important! It is from the name that life breathes through us. There is great power in names. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.’ s**t, Kid! Aren’t you up on your classics?”

Both the kid and Cassie stared at him. You could drop a flaming sword on their heads and they probably wouldn’t blink. He was tempted to try it and find out.

“s**t!” he muttered to himself. He was always going off the deep end. As long as his plan moved ahead, what should he care. But the universe did have a pattern, and that pattern must be respected.

“Look,” he held his hands apart in front of him trying to display the truth he clasped between them.

“All I’m saying is that if you’ve created a…creation important enough to be named, and you haven’t bothered to do so, then it really isn’t created yet.” He was babbling, which for a poet was a pretty low state. He really had to get his act together. “It is the Word that manifests its existence and purpose. It is the Name that aligns with Intention and creates the true shape in the universal time-space-string continuum thing.” Thing? Seriously lame.

Again the slow stereo blink, the kid’s dark eyes and Cassie’s pale ones.

“Fine,” the kid looked dreamily back at his pile of electronics. “I’ll name it Betsy.”

“Betsy? You can’t name it Betsy!” He thought about it a bit. “That would be Elizabeth, which mean ‘God’s oath.’ No, Kid, I can’t let you do that. It’s just not right.”

“Its name is Betsy, after the steno machine in Robert Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil. So get off my case. Who the hell are you guys anyway?”

“See, names are important.” Named for a sci-fi novel. It gave him the creeps, but he reminded himself to focus on the important battles. Naming this…thing ‘Betsy’ wasn’t the worst that could happen. But it wasn’t good either.

“I am Virgil.”

“Huh?”

“Dante’s Virgil.”

The kid looked at him blankly.

“I’m the guy who led Dante into Hell because a w***e-b***h named Beatrice insisted that she had the mandate of a heavenly council to make me do it and she didn’t want to get her feet dirty by treading there herself. Wouldn’t let me into Purgatory even after I’d done her bidding. Never let me get a lousy hand on her, which was also part of the deal.”

“Dante’s Virgil?”

Bloody humans, so slow.

“In my living room?”

“At your service.” He bowed deeply with a proper Roman flourish. Dead for over two millennia and he still had the moves.

He nodded toward Cassie. “This is Cassie.”

“Right. And that makes you either the lead dancer in A Chorus Line or a prophet cursed with being right all the time whom no one will ever believe.”

The kid was quick after all. They were going to need quick.

“You got it in one, Kid. Two actually, but you got it.”

The kid glanced at her. It was easy to underestimate Cassandra. Descended from the great throne of Troy itself, she was tall, for Ancient Greece. At five foot two, with gray hair most of the way down to her waist, she was very easy to underestimate. But Virgil knew better. He’d ended up stuck in Hell for a millennia until that guy Dante came along and Beatrice had wanted a guide for him, all because he didn’t believe one little thing Cassie had tried to tell him. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

“And…she didn’t answer me herself because if she did, I wouldn’t believe her.”

She nodded.

And Jeremy snapped out, “Bull!” faster than his optic nerves could have processed the confirmation.

Virgil clamped a hand on the kid’s shoulder and twisted the kid to face him. Before he could speak, the kid leapt to his feet and paced over to the mustard couch and back.

“Not buying it from either of you.” His face was getting red. The first sign of color in his pallid face. “You’re just two psycho gamers who passed the seventh circle and detoured to Ancient Greece in the fifth or sixth nexus. Get a life people. It’s just a damn game.”

He sounded confident. The confidence of a mortal who’d been right pretty much all the time, and hadn’t been berated for it in the couple of years since he’d locked himself in his bedroom and come out with the Number One Net game in history. But the slim shoulder wasn’t as sure. It twitched a bit as if the kid’s shirt fit wrong.

“We need to get a bit of meat on you. Because believe her or not, we need your help.”

“Really?”

Before Cassie could complete another nod, Virgil raised a finger and she stopped.

“Look, Kid, we need you. And you need us. Betsy there,” he suppressed a shudder and looked away from the screens of gibberish.

“Betsy is on the track of serious s**t you don’t know about yet. Cassie spotted it. And she thinks you might be what we need. Let’s sit down and we’ll talk it over.”

“Why should I believe either of you? And how did you know about this? I’ve got Betsy firewalled mighty deep.”

“What’s the username of the hacker that broke the C3 security site at NSA?” He had no idea quite what that meant except that it was both impossible and that Cassie had been the girl to do it.

“It was…” He blinked in slow motion and looked over at the prophet. “…Cassandra of Troy.”

“Seeing is believing, Kid.” Virgil clapped him on the shoulder and almost drove the kid down through the floorboards.