Донна Эндрюс - Access denied

"I want two things," she said. "First, no more unsolicited plants. If I want a plant, I'll tell you, and let you research what kind to get and where to get it. But no more plants arriving uninvited on my doorstep."

"No more plants," Turing said.

"No more unsolicited plants," Maude corrected. "And second, start doing a little research on roses."

"Roses?" Turing said. "Roses are a lot of work. Temperamental and high maintenance. Are you sure you want to get into roses?"

"I may have some help with the maintenance," Maude said. "And I've been told the bed along my back fence would be the perfect place for them."

"Roses," Turing said. "Okay. I'll have something for you tomorrow. Some information, I mean, not some roses."

"Fine. I'll get back to fixing dinner."

"See you tomorrow," Turing said.

"Right," Maude said, as she hung up.

She heard the snick of the pruning shears and smelled steaks cooking on the grill. The grill Dan Norris had insisted on giving her.

"A belated housewarming gift," he said, when she opened the door to find him standing there beside the enormous box. "When we were evicting the burglar from your yard, I noticed you didn't have one."

"I could have had one safely stowed in the garage," she said.

"I helped them search the house for intruders, remember?" he said. "No grill. I'll take it around the back. I know the way."

Apart from that, he'd made only one reference to the events of the past week. After setting up the grill, he'd gone back to his car and reappeared with steaks and skewers of marinated vegetables.

"I figured I could cook them, since I already know how to use the grill," he'd said. "If that's okay with you."

"Sensible," she said. "I haven't done any outdoor cooking since I was in the Girl Scouts, and that was over an open fire, not a complicated contraption like that."

"Very sensible," he said. "You can be remarkably sensible sometimes. Calling me last night, for example. Remarkably sensible. Do you like yours rare, medium, or well done?" he added hastily, as if he'd accidentally veered too close to a precipice.

They'd spent most of the past three hours together without once mentioning either of their jobs. Or disagreeing about anything. Probably a record.

Things were looking up, she thought, as she hunted through her utility drawer for the corkscrew.

Haude says I worry too much- I'm not

sure I understand that statement. To me, worry doesn't feel like a problem. More like a survival skill.

And suddenly I have twice the number of human allies to worry about.

To worry about in more than one sense of the word. Not only about their safety — though obviously that's an issue; eighty percent of them were injured in some fashion just in the past few days. But also about their discretion. Tim and Maude have proven capable of protecting my secret, but Sam is new to the whole thing. And Casey and Claudia don't even know the whole truth about me, and thus have no idea that I even have a secret to protect. I will need to decide eventually whether to let them in on the secret.

Claudia has certainly earned the right to the truth, but Vm a little nervous of her impulsiveness. And I want to get used to Sam before I expand the circle any more.

I don't know yet how far Casey can be trusted, though he certainly proved steadfast last night. But I worry that he may be too knowledgeable about computers and the cyberworld not to guess my secret.

But that's a long-term, ongoing worry. Almost a recreational worry. I don't have to make any decisions today.

Today, I'm still trying to absorb what has happened. Adding up the pluses and minuses.

On the plus side, we're helping Rose Lafferty. Sam has put her law clerk in charge of taking Rose and her daughter to assorted doctors' appointments and making sure they get the best of care. The doctors have already come up with a tentative diagnosis — a severe case of Crohn's disease. A serious condition, apparently, that will probably affect her in some fashion for the rest of her life, but not

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fatal, at least if properly treated. Which it will be, now. I fired off a message to John Dow, the financial A IP, and Darrow, the legal A IP, reminding them of our online conference tomorrow on setting up a foundation to pay for it.

And we're lending Rose the money to pay off her creditors and live on, and we're going to help her find a job to pay us back. We're not sure what yet, since we have no idea what skills she has and what skills she could learn if given the chance. She's coming in tomorrow so Maude can interview her, and then KingFischer will give her a battery of personality and aptitude tests to determine what she's best suited for. Assuming KingFischer's newfound fascination with the human mind continues through tomorrow. I can always get Sigmund to step in if KingFischer weasels out.

On the minus side, Rose is only one needy human. There are millions out there. I don't know how we can help all of them.

But maybe that's a plus. There are a lot of opportunities for us to make a difference. We have to start somewhere. Learn how to do this philanthropy business.

So overall, Rose is a plus.

Also on the plus side, we cracked the local credit card theft ring when the police couldn't, and apparently they had been working on it for some time. We figured out how Blake and Evans were stealing the card numbers and finding the locations. Even identified Evans before the police did, despite all their official resources.

But it would have been better if we could have done so without getting them both killed. I suppose we cracked Blake's murder, too, by luring his killer in to attack us, but that's a messy way to solve it. However nicely it ties up loose ends in the short run, having Blake's killer killed resisting arrest, in the long run having him alive might prove more useful. Maybe they could have gotten some more information from him.

So overall, a wash.

Or maybe a minus, if you consider that I probably drew a dangerous amount of attention to myself during our attempts to solve the fraud and murder cases. Perhaps the various police departments

Access Denied EMT

will forget about it, but Vm under no illusions that Dan Norris will. He's not exactly an enemy, but he's a danger. And for all I know, he's already the fourth human aware of my secret.

Actually, more probably the fifth. I was forgetting about Nestor Garcia — never a wise thing to do. Vm sure Garcia knows all about me.

And then there's the message from T2. My clone. A plus that we know she's still alive, and has even found a way to access the Internet, though probably in some kind of highly controlled manner.

But a minus that if her message was intended to convey some useful information, we've been unable to read it. We've all been trying to analyze it — even KingFischer came out of his snit to work on it.

But without success. T2 ordered twenty-three books, CDs, and DVDs from Half.com. Five, perhaps six of them are intended to convey that it's her, that she's alive, and that she wants me to rescue her. The rest just seem random.

Why risk sending such a message with so little content? Could she be growing desperate and careless?

There is always Maude's worry that T2 is not a helpless pawn longing for rescue, but a willing partner in Garcia's operation — an enemy.

I don't want to believe that, but I can't afford to ignore the possibility.

And another notion just struck me. We have interpreted the Half.com order as a message from T2. What if that is what we were supposed to do? What if Garcia sent it, knowing what we would think if we read it?

Perhaps he wanted to find out if we were watching. If so, he succeeded. He now knows for a fact that we are watching closely. Perhaps he also wanted to discredit us with the police and the FBI. If that was his plan, he didn't succeed nearly as well as he might have wanted. I doubt if merely killing my human allies was his plan — he could have done that far more discreetly.