Chapter Eleven

Accents! Road Trip!

I'm pretty sure this chapter is actually safe. Go me! The rest stop mentioned herein does, in fact, exist, although I've relocated it from somewhere in the middle of Nowhere, Southwest edition to Nowhere, Northwest edition. The only thing fictional is the food, because I didn't eat at the cafe. Even the snake exists, somewhere in the American Southwest. Presumably in a town called Eden or Garden or something biblical.

They watched the unfortunate guard lead his recalcitrant, and likely sticky, charge out of the museum and into the street via security camera. "There were so many ways that could have gone better," Stranger said. "So many. I can't even count them all."

"Ignoring the essentially infinite minute variations that would essentially have no difference from one another," Alice said, "I must agree that there are at least several thousand ways we could have had less trouble with this."

"Let's go," Caroline said. She had been quiet for a while, obviously a bit pissed. Now she was marching off, leaving them behind in her haste to go.

Havisham caught up with her. "No more rushing off thoughtlessly," he told her. "That ends badly, remember?"

"They still haven't made more than four feet's worth of inroads into the old office," she said, a hint of smugness showing. "They won't find a thin before the lawyers get them out of there."

"Yes, but then we're going to have to deal with it, and it will be a pain in the ass," he told her patiently. "Now we do this slowly and with thought, and save ourselves some trouble."

She glared at him momentarily, then took a deep breath. "Right, obviously. I'm just - Sir Dick is such a slippery bastard! We think we've got him and he's just gone!"

"Dicks are like that," Stranger said solemnly. "Liable to avoid being caught in traps."

"Shut up," she snapped.

"Shutting."

She took another deep breath. "How much trouble do you think we might be in now?" she asked MacAlleister.

"Honestly, this is Clark Sr. we're talking about. Depending on his mood, he might have done anything from not noticed his son's disappearance to sending out a SWAT team to coming to talk to us in person."

"What a perceptive woman," came a slick Boston accent. "Third time's the charm, I suppose. What did you do to my son, and how difficult should I make your lives because of it?"

"Absolutely nothing, and not at all," Stranger said, going for cheery and getting slightly constipated.

"It's answers like that that make me suspect the truth is being concealed," said Clark Sr., stepping out from a conveniently placed shadow. "The truth now."

Stranger glanced at the professionals. They seemed slightly awkward themselves. But then, of all people, George stepped up. "Hey, man, how are you? We didn't do a thing to your son, other than unfortunately provide him an opportunity to indulge in certain unsavory habits. He's fine, there won't be any further issues with him, and we will stay out of your way insomuch as that is possible given our current task."

"And what might that be?" Clark Sr. asked.

"Incapacitating one Sir Richard Stomcock. Do you know of him?"

"I know he's a bastard," Clark said. "A big one. The kind that a wise man should not mess around with."

"We are not messing," Caroline said, stepping forward. "We are dealing. The sooner he is properly dealt with, the better."

"You obviously need some help dealing," Clark Sr. said. "Especially if my son going out for a joyride is enough to derail your plans."

"I will admit he was an unforeseen complication. However, we shall endeavor to ascertain that we tail the correct car next time," Caroline said.

That reminded Stranger of something rather important. Where was Sir Dick, anyway? If he hadn't left, was he still sequestered down beneath the city, or had he left sometime in the past several hours? The base had been incommunicado for the same amount of time; did that mean something untowarded had happened, or just that they'd seen nothing fit to report?

He was distracted from his worries by Carl Sr. stepping forward, towards him. "You," he said, "I like. Keep it up. My son has had fewer run-ins with the law since he started frequenting that bar of yours, and I know him well enough to know that it's not because of his own self-improvement.."

"Thank you?" Stranger said. "I'll do my best?"

"Good." Then Carl Sr. snapped his fingers and turned, walking back into the shadows. From the balconies above them, they heard numerous little clicks - safeties being turned back on on various rifles. Stranger retroactively forgot how to breath.

The group stood there, still, in the dark, until MacAlleister deemed it safe not to. She started moving forward purposefully, and everyone else just followed her. Stranger found that the Museum was far less spooky when he knew that what he was likely to have to deal with later was much more likely to end up with him dead.

Breaking the silence, he asked, "What now?"

"Well, we hope that Carl Sr. is actually in a good mood today, we go back to the base, and we try to find Sir Dick before he calls down a tactical nuclear strike on us," MacAlleister said. She sounded serious.

"He's probably confused right now," Havisham said. "We raid the house of someone even he's probably a little nervous of, go after said person's son, and seem to get out of it okay, but with no discernible negotiation or trade. He's going to be worried we struck up some sort of bargain, or at the very least wondering what the hell we're doing."

"Considering the fact that so are we, I don't know if that's an advantage," Caroline said, sourly.

"We're being unpredictable," George said. "Think of it that way. Before this chaos and the scattering, more or less, of your resources to the seven winds, he knew what you were capable of, he knew your methods, and he knew that you were still being professional about all of this. Now, though, you're down to a skeleton force, you've got only the resources I can get you, and you're acting in ways that make no sense to him. He's just gone from playing a solved game to playing poker blindfolded. You've got the advantage on him."

"Your's is a happy nature, isn't it?" Caroline asked him.

"Yes, pretty much."

She shook her head. "Izze, we're going to need to regroup. Contact Jean, will you? Manny, you're in charge of resettling. The Chicago office should be good." She turned to George, Stranger, and Alice. "You three just... Do whatever the hell you want. Don't get in our way, and try not to get yourselves killed. Sound good?"

"Can we come back to the base?" Stranger asked. "Because I really don't think there's any other option if we want to avoid becoming unnecessarily deceased."

"Yes, sure, fine."

And so they took public transportation back to the base, which turned out to be a sub-basement of a parking garage, which made sense when Stranger thought about it.

-------

The three of them were left to their own devices while the unnamed regrouped and started coming up with a legitimate plan. George was typing again, doing obscure things to obscure stocks in obscure countries, shifting the market in arcane ways that to Stranger were as good as witchcraft. George said that it all made sense and was perfectly legal, but considering George's strange definition of 'legal,' Stranger wasn't sure what that meant.

Alice was sitting in a corner, an extension cord plugged in to his chest and trailing down around to a wall outlet. His eyes were closed, and he was as still as an statue. Every so often, though, Stranger would hear a faint noise, music being played very softly and very quickly, seeming to emanate from him. Once, he even made out what might have been the theme song for a certain popular show about a time-traveling alien.

Stranger himself was sitting in the corner of their current room, in a large, extremely comfortable chair, trying to sleep and failing miserably. It wasn't fair, he thought, sitting there. He got a bit of downtime, here at the ungodly hour of three AM, and he couldn't sleep. Not fair. He liked sleep, he really should be able to do it whenever. But no, give him a bit of an adrenalin rush and suddenly sleep became something from the past, something he pondered while he tried to decide whether that really was the Star Trek theme song being hummed by Alice. Unfair.

He gave up after what felt like several aeons, and hoisted himself from the chair to go look over George's shoulder. True to form, one screen was a jumble of numbers that looked slightly dangerous to Stranger, and the other was a game of Tetris. George was playing both screens at once, pausing the game every thirty seconds or so to change a series of numbers in the other screen.

"You're running both of those things in your head, aren't you?" Stranger asked him.

"Yep," George said, eyes never leaving the screen.

"You're a freak."

"Yep."

"Could you play solitaire as well, or chess?"

"I don't like playing chess against a computer," George said. "And it's possible to find an unwinnable game of solitaire. I prefer things I know I can beat."

"So do drummers."

"That doesn't even make sense."

"You don't make sense."

"On the contrary, I make lots of sense."

That was when Alice sat bolt upright in his chair, and said, "Captain, the security teams are havin' a bit o' trouble. We need to give them some assistance, and be quick aboot it."

That managed to break the rhythm of their banter, and George and Stranger looked up at him. "What?" they asked, at the same time.

"Caroline and the others need some help," Alice said, still in an impeccable Scottich accent. "We should go."

"Why are you speaking like that?" Stranger asked him, even as he went for the door.

"Because Scotty is a highly interestin' character, and I wish that he might exist in the future, so that I may speak with him. It's a cryin' shame that he's fictional." Alice shook his head. "But I have hope, because so am I."

"You're a strange duck," Stranger told him. "I hope you know that." He tried the door, but it was locked. "Dammit all."

"Please move, Captain," Alice said. Stranger got out of the way, and Alice, moving too quick for the eye to see, punched the door. It swung open.

Stranger looked at him with new found respect. "Remind me not to irritate you."

"I operate, in part, off the Three Rules designed by Asimov," Alice said. "George was wise in that regard."

"Also very nerdy," Stranger said. "But it this case I appreciate it."

"See, I can be practical," George told him, as they left the room and moved at speed down the long, narrow hallway.

"Only in specialized circumstances, when you get to fulfill the ideas written by your favorite authors," Stranger said.

"True."

"Where are we going?" Stranger asked Alice.

"The alarm, as far as I could tell, was coming from this way," Alice said, making a sharp right turn down a different hall. "Oh, yes, indeed. And there are worried voices, as well."

"Why can't anything ever be easy?" Stranger asked the world at large. "Just give us an hour or two without something happening. Is that too much to ask?"

"Yes," Alice told him. "It would make the narrative less interesting."

Stranger gave him a look. "Should we be rationing your exposure to fiction?"

"Too late, the damage has been done. I shall continue to make meta-fictional remarks until I find something funnier to do," Alice said, sagely.

Stranger looked at George as they made another turn. "Your AI is defective."

"But it's fun to listen to, isn't it?" George asked.

"I live to serve," Alice said, stopping abruptly. "Here. Through this door."

Stranger opened it and went through, to the surprise of the four arguing on the other side.

Caroline recovered first. "Dammit, what do you not understand about staying out of our hair?" she asked, furiously.

"Alice said that you were in trouble," Stranger said, her reaction throwing him a little off-kilter. "Was he wrong?"

"Whether he was wrong is not the point," she told him, standing and beginning to advance on him. "You are a civilian, and Alice, while doubtlessly an amazing achievement and a good person, is still an untested prototype. You have no clue what you are doing, and to be perfectly honest, you're listening to a foreign intelligence that gets its kicks impersonating one of our most famous villains. You are not a help."

Stranger opened his mouth to say something witty, something to prove her absurdly wrong, and then shut it again. What he finally said was, "What happened?"

Caroline sagged, and Stranger caught Havisham, MacAlleister, and Jean all relaxing back into their seats. "We've been cut off," she said. "It's not directly related to Sir Dick, but the opportunity afforded by our... difficulties was taken advantage of. A splinter group - a collection of agents who went rogue - are attacking our offices in other countries. Some locations are just openly cutting off from us. We're alone here."

"How is that different from what we were dealing with before?" Stranger asked. "It's not like you were planning on relying on foreign assistance."

"No, but it's just one more thing I have to deal with," she said, sitting back down hard. "On top of Sir Dick and accidentally maybe pissing off a mob boss."

Stranger shrugged. There wasn't really anything he could say to that.

"The only thing left for it is to head to Chicago, now," Caroline said, composing herself. "Havisham, is it ready?"

"And more than," he said. "We might want to take less-than-obvious routes to get there, though."

"Not the buses," MacAlleister said. "Law enforcement is still going to be on the lookout for those."

Stranger restrained himself from asking why they hadn't been on the lookout for them from the beginning.

"Good point," Caroline said. "How else should we go, though?"

"Road trip," George said, firmly. "We'll take a road trip."

------

Stranger's life had become highly odd recently, he admitted that. But somehow, even a sentient AI that looked likes Mr. Babbage's wet dream wasn't as weird as that same AI singing along to classic rock with Darth Vader's voice, while road-tripping to Chicago with four nearly burnt-out agents of a secret spy organization and one probably-billionaire, all in a classic Vannagon. Stranger was sitting in the back beside Havisham, looking out the window and wondering whether Alice was singing off-key on purpose. George was driving - "I got the car, didn't I?" - something that all of them were beginning to regret, he was sure. MacAlleister had drawn the short straw and was sitting next to him, glowering to the world outside her window. Alice was sitting between Jean and Caroline, a state of affairs Stranger could tell would be changing at the next rest stop. At this rate, Alice would be lucky if he wasn't tied to the roof. It was the middle of the day, or close to it, and they'd all grabbed a couple hours' sleep back when they'd started, at dawn, while letting Alice drive. They'd all regretted that pretty much as soon as they'd woken up. Incredible articulation and coordination and a brain that learned faster than just about anything somehow did not add up to an android that could drive well. He wasn't sure whether it was because Alice tried to drive logically - a bad idea anywhere near Boston - or if Alice had just consumed enough pop culture to think someone driving badly was amusing. Stranger had made a mental note to introduce Alice to the works of Pratchett, so he could discover what good humor was.

When Don't Stop Believing started playing, in an effort to prevent the first AI murder in the world, Stranger said a little desperately, "I'm a little hungry. Now's a good time for a break, agreed?"

Everyone did agree, although Alice wanted to stay in the car until the song was over. It was agreed that he could, if George stopped now. He did, at a little tourist-trap convenience store called Eden.

The humans got out, and went through the stretching and groaning and 'Oh my god, I was about to punch Alice'-ing routine that every group of people goes through when they escape the confines of a small space and the forced proximity to others. Stranger, having already been on one road trip in the past week, was less than thrilled at the whole thing, and found George's enthusiasm for such trips - even when he wasn't driving - a bit irritating. The thing was, with road trips, that if there was any trait you didn't particularly like in one of your traveling companions, you would grow to absolutely loathe it, them, and the world in general if you didn't get out and do something at least once a day. They were well on their way to that, because none of the people in the car had more than three other people they cared for, except for Alice, who liked everyone and was disliked unanimously by that point. And even Alice was less than pleased by now, because they refused to let him leave the car even after the song ended, stating reasons of national security.

"It's alright," he said. "I wasn't going to leave anyway. I know what I look like, and what kinds of reactions I'll get. But you don't need to act like I'm an idiot."

"I was just keeping in mind your creator and the company he keeps," Caroline had told him, thereby offending all three of them for various reasons. Getting to Chicago was going to be hell, and actually arriving a blessing. The biblical language was influenced by the rest stop. Because, when they went in, after they took care of various necessities that arose after six hours in a moving vehicle, they all stopped, more or less awestruck by the interior.

There were no words for the place. It was... It just was. The name Eden was obviously a gimmick, and one they played to the hilt. Half the building was filled by the typical convenience store stuff, albeit slightly larger and better supplied than average and filled with signs declaring their 'sinfully low prices.' The other half was a cafe. Simply calling it a cafe was a lie by omission, though. It was to a typical cafe what Wall Drug was to a normal drug store, and for the same touristy reasons. It was called the Garden, as told by the large neon sign on the wall beside the counter, complete with a coiling snake flickering its tongue from its position around the G.

But by far he first thing you noticed, before anything else in the building, was the tree. It was a huge, presumably fake fig tree, situated in the center of the dining area. It went up into the ceiling, and its branches spread out to cover every square in of it, which was painted black from what Stranger could see, to heighten the illusion. The branches even extended into the convenience store section, where signs dangled advertising the previously mentioned sinful prices. (Stranger doubted whether low prices could actually be considered sinful - as far as he was aware, charging interest was sinful, and defrauding others was, but not voluntarily slimming down your own profit margins. Although, when he glanced at the prices in question, they might definitely fall afoul of defrauding.) There were animatronic parrots perched here and there amongst the leaves, making generic bird noises and occasionally repeating snippets of the noises from the store. There was a waterfall, bubbling down from a cleverly hidden fountain beside the tree trunk, and following a path down and around the trunk to disappear into one of many artfully placed raised flowerbeds. And noticed last, after the patron was dazzled by the general over-the-topness of the place, was the snake, a huge boa constrictor trailing through the tree branches, camouflaged to be almost invisible except for the eyes. These glowed red at apparently random intervals. Stranger nearly had a heart attack when he finally saw the thing, which would have been unfortunate, but likely not unusual for the place, considering the food.

The food the Garden served was yet another gimmick, albeit a subtler one. It was the kind of food that was very tempting, but very, very bad for you. Unlike the fair food that it reminded Stranger of, though, this food seemed appetizing in other situations than that of utter exhaustion. It was fried chicken, mashed potatoes, big fat steaks, thick chocolaty things that had names like 'Death by Chocolate' and such. It was the kind of food that stuck to your ribs and your arteries. But Stranger, who hadn't really eaten in ages, didn't care at that point. He wanted food and he wanted it hot and he wanted it now. The Garden was more than able to do that, much to his satisfaction. And he even managed to ignore the parrots and the snake whilst he ate.

The group ate in silence. It somehow didn't seem right to be talking at the moment, as much due to the sheer necessity of eating as to the gravity of their situation in general. Of course, the gravity of the situation was lessened slightly, at least in Stranger's mind, now that they were eating at a novelty theme restaurant somewhere between Boston and Indiana. Nothing can seem like a life or death situation when there's a slightly ratty animatronic parrot repeating the noise of a cash register in your ear, except for perhaps the parrot.

They rolled out, almost literally, in under half an hour, and were back on the road. Stranger ended up between Alice and George. MacAlleister and Havisham had the wheel and passenger seat respectively, and Jean and Caroline were in the back seat talking in low voices. George, who evidently wasn't as immune to irritation as Stranger had thought, had had words with Alice. Now neither was speaking to the other, but Stranger thought this a small price to pay, considering that Alice wasn't speaking to anyone now, or indeed at all. And so they went.