Донна Эндрюс: Click here for murder

Once awake, she tolerated no shilly-shallying. No weak toying with the snooze bar, no self-indulgent moping around with the excuse that she hadn’t had her coffee yet.

As she moved methodically through the daily rituals of dressing, eating, and preparing for work, her mind was already busy with the day ahead. At 6 A.M. she would begin her job as executive assistant to the senior vice president of marketing at Universal Library. Or perhaps “role” would be more accurate. J. Rodney Vaughn III, the distinguished gray-haired man actually hired for the post, was really a failed actor who hoped to become a screenwriter. Roddy-looked and sounded impressive in meetings, while Turing and Maude did all the actual work. Now that they’d built

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his reputation as a renegade who preferred to telecommute, they’d established Roddy in what Tim melodramatically referred to as “the safe house”—a charming if somewhat dilapidated farmhouse near Charlottesville. Every six weeks or so, Roddy would invite Maude and Tim down for a weekend, and they would endure dramatic readings from his latest script and detailed inspections of his latest decorating projects, all for the sake of the gourmet meals that followed. And once a month or so, Roddy would show up in person to terrorize the UL staff and keep his legend alive. The rest of the time, Maude and Turing ran the show.

As fascinating as Maude found her secret role at UL, her heart was really in the second job. Every day, at 3 P.M., she’d log out of the UL system, tidy her desk, and leave the sleek, modern UL building to walk a dozen blocks to the slightly run-down warehouse that housed Alan Grace, Inc.—Turing’s brainchild, and when the time was right, Turing’s new home.

UL and Alan Grace projects jostled for her attention like a crowd of unruly children. Several times during her morning routine she’d pause, pick up the to-do list she’d drawn up on Friday afternoon, and read it or scribble updates. By the time she took off for work, she knew, she’d have organized the chaotic jumble of morning thoughts into a plan for the day.

As she rinsed the dishes and loaded her dishwasher, Maude realized that she was humming as she thought about the day ahead.

I’m happy, she thought with a hint of surprise. Absurd,

r

really. Back when Alan Grace had existed only online, as

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Turing’s means of funding some of her projects, Maude had only needed to make an occasional phone call, or mail in a form to keep the company going. Even when they first opened the physical office, she only needed an hour or two to take care of any important business. But now, by the time she finished at Alan Grace, it would be eight or nine o’clock. Barely enough time to travel home and eat a light dinner before bed. She tried to preserve her weekends for friends and a little reading, but all too often she’d come home from dining out and settle in for a few hours of paperwork.

Sooner or later, she’d have to choose between UL and Alan Grace. She knew it would be hard to find someone to replace her at UL. Someone sharp enough to run marketing who would be content to remain the power behind the throne. With Ray Santiago running systems at Alan Grace—and systems was almost all of Alan Grace—Maude was less necessary there. So logically she should remain at UL. She would, if Turing asked her. But what she really wanted to do, what she’d do if given the choice, was move full time to Alan Grace. Computers were a recent passion with Maude; she’d only discovered her aptitude for working with them while helping Turing solve the disappearance of her programmer. But she’d fallen for them, hard. Even though working at Alan Grace often made her feel, like the Red Queen, as if she were running as fast as she could just to stay in place, she loved the race. She felt proud of her limited but growing technical expertise, and unashamedly grateful that Ray and his staff didn’t treat her like a complete idiot— that they tried to help her learn rather than dismissing her as over the hill.

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It ought to bother her, she thought, that at some future time, she would need to make a difficult decision and perhaps give up a key part of her life. But it didn’t; at least not much. She didn’t have to deal with it yet. She could enjoy this happy phase of her life while it lasted, for as long as it lasted.

She was still ten minutes away from leaving when the phone rang.

Unusual; only a few people knew Maude well enough to realize that she would be awake this early; and which of them could possibly be awake themselves?

Turing, of course, Maude thought, even before she glanced at the caller ID. But Turing usually made such a point of respecting her weekends, she thought as she lifted the receiver. What on earth—?

“Maude?”

Perhaps it was only her imagination that the synthesized voice Turing used for phone calls sounded upset.

“What’s wrong?” Maude asked.

“Ray’s dead.”

Tim sat at his too-clean deskn looked at his

equally naked calendar, and sighed. He glanced at the computer, wondered if the universe would really care if he frittered away the morning playing Beyond Paranoia, and then forced himself back to the few papers before him. Bills, and an unfinished surveillance report.

In the game, his PI character did really cool things— meeting mysterious characters in sleazy bars; passing around

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rumors of drug smuggling, gunrunning, and murder for hire; and flirting with beautiful dames.

Being a real private investigator wasn’t quite the same. Clients weren’t exactly beating down his door. And he usually ended up turning away half the people who walked through it anyway. Some couldn’t pay even Tim’s modest fees. Others wanted things that were illegal, unethical, or frankly impossible. He wasn’t about to take money from the man whose missing girlfriend probably didn’t want to be found, at least not by someone Tim suspected of being a little too ready with his fists. Or from the woman who didn’t even care when he told her there was no legal way to get the information she wanted on her ex-husband’s finances. Or the woman who wanted him to investigate a twenty-year-old homicide and tell her the reason someone shot her son outside a gay bar—a reason other than the obvious; a reason she could accept.

His bread-and-butter work came from Turing, or through Turing. Routine background checks, mostly, requiring nothing more than a lot of routine phone calls, routine computer searches, and routine visits to local courthouses. Occasionally, he did workmen’s comp or insurance cases, following hapless people around the city, ready to snap photos when they inevitably grew careless and did something that couldn’t be done with whatever dire injuries they claimed to have suffered. And then, if he’d been spotted, he’d put as much distance as possible between him and his supposedly disabled targets, before they decided whether to disassemble Tim or his camera.

And then there was surveillance. Every time he did a

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surveillance job, he swore he’d never do it again. In the winter, you froze in unheated cars; in the summer, you battled bugs and dehydration along with the heat; and peeing in a bottle wasn’t fun anytime. And why didn’t someone warn him that chiggers and poison ivy were such an occupational hazard of outdoor stakeouts?

PI work was much more interesting in books and movies, he thought, absently scratching his arm. Or in Beyond Paranoia. But however eager he was to make his rep as a sharp PI in the alternate world of the game, it wasn’t going to pay the bills. Turing would, if necessary, but he felt guilty about letting her subsidize his new business any more than she already had. Up until six months ago, he’d been a copy operator—or as he preferred to call himself, the Xeroxcist— at Universal Library. Then, after he’d helped Turing solve the disappearance of her programmer, she’d offered to front him the money to go to PI school and set up an office. He still wasn’t sure whether she’d done it because she thought he showed promise as a PI or because she thought he needed all the help he could get. But she was footing the bills until he started breaking even. Which meant the least he could do was give her routine jobs top priority, right?