Outlive (The Baggers Trilogy, #1) (44 page)

             
Gigi cut him off, talking so loudly that she was almost yelling, “The K9s record what we say, to ensure that we don’t talk about anything we shouldn’t.”

             
She looked at Baggs with her eyes that were too far apart. “Okay,” Baggs said. “I understand.”
She knows something,
he thought. The K9 glared at him with glossy eyes.
I need to find out what Turner’s plan is while we’re alone with Gigi. I need to get the information in such a way that Gigi won’t get in trouble for alerting us to her father’s intentions, should he ever listen to the recording the K9 makes. I need to approach this topic gently.

             
“How was your day?” Baggs asked, walking along side her horse.

             
“Good,” she said. She looked nauseated with fear.

             
“Do you think your father will invite us to dinner?” Baggs asked.

             
Gigi just stared ahead of her at the house as her horse walked slowly beneath her. She didn’t answer.
It’s as though she’s been threatened to keep quiet,
Baggs thought.

             
“Gigi, is something wrong?” he asked.

             
She didn’t look at him, but just said, “I don’t fraternize with poor people, or Outlive contestants.”

             
Baggs thought back to his conversation with Gigi in the piano room a week ago.
Maybe her father found out about that meeting and has threatened to hurt her if she continues to be friendly with us. This is not how she used to act towards me. Something is wrong.
The K9 sitting behind her was looking up at the back of Gigi’s head.
I wonder if it’s videotaping her, also.

             
“Why don’t you fraternize with poor people?” Baggs asked.

             
“I don’t have to answer you,” she said. Her voice sounded hateful, but there was no hate in her eyes. She was putting on a show for the K9.
Her father must have said he would watch this recording later. Maybe this is some kind of a test for her.

             
“Do you think that I could use the phone inside to call my wife and kids?” Baggs asked. “I’d like to talk to them.”

             
Gigi’s body rocked atop the huge horse. She didn’t respond, but Baggs saw tears roll down her cheeks.

             
Baggs thought
Byron Turner, you bastard, what did you do to her?

             
By the time they made it to the house, her tears had dried. She hadn’t said another word to the three of them, which was fine by Baggs. He didn’t want her to get into trouble.
I certainly don’t want Turner to think that Gigi knew about our plan ahead of time. I don’t want her taking any of the blame for what’s about to happen.

             
The front door was flanked by two K9s that were inspecting who entered. There was another K9, a white, slender one, standing in the doorway. The animal’s pink leather nose flicked up and down as it smelled the newcomers.

             
“Follow Roger, he’ll lead you to my mom,” Gigi said. She turned and began to ride away.

             
The three of them followed the K9 named Roger into the enormous, marble-filled entryway, up several flights of stairs, down a series of long hallways, and into the kitchen they had eaten in before flying off to the Colosseum.

             
Turner’s wife, Cindi, greeted them in the kitchen. She was wearing a tight, white button up shirt that barely stretched over her cartoon-like fake breasts. She also wore a pearl necklace, diamond stud earrings, navy dress pants, and black leather flats with some designer’s symbol stitched around the surface. “Oooohhh,” she said, bouncing on the balls of her feet and clapping. “I’m so excited to see you three! We weren’t expecting you until later. Byron is so proud of how well you did in the Colosseum; only four out of seven of you died, that’s so great!” She looked at the large grandfather clock that sat against the back wall. “Dinner won’t be for another hour. You three take a seat. I’ll serve tea. And, feel free to use the bathroom to…er… wash up.” She smiled wanly, looking over the three blood-streaked, filthy vagrants in her regal kitchen. “We’re having some friends over for dinner—the Potts, as in Fred Pott in Parliament. Anyways, go wash up and then have a seat; bathroom’s down that hallway. I’ll be with your shortly.” She disappeared off into the kitchen.

             
She talks at us, not to us,
Baggs thought.
She didn’t ask us how we were doing, or if we wanted tea, she just assumes that she knows better. To her, our opinions are about as important as the thoughts of one of her thoroughbreds.

             
Baggs also noted that Cindi Turner was very unlike Gigi Turner in that she did not seem the least bit nervous being around people Byron was planning on killing.
The difference is that Cindi sees us as items that her husband used to make money and Gigi views us as humans just like herself.

             
“I’m going to the bathroom to clean up,” Spinks told Larry and Baggs; though, both of them knew the real reason she wanted to turn and walk down the hall. She was still hugging her arms to her chest.
I hope that her injury doesn’t stop her from doing what she needs to do.
Spinks turned and walked down the hallway. Baggs was disgruntled to see that Roger the white K9 followed her.
Hopefully when she goes back there the next time, the K9 won’t follow her. If it does, we’re screwed.

             
Larry and Baggs sat down and looked at the grandfather clock. After a few minutes, Cindi came in with hot cups of tea on a tray. The cups were made out of delicate white chinaware. She sat the tray down without even glancing at her guests, and then disappeared through the swinging door into the kitchen. Spinks came back a few minutes later. Baggs wanted to ask her how her investigation to the place that Baggs had seen upon going to the bathroom a week ago went. She was better with computers and would be able to assess the place better than Baggs. However, he didn’t ask. Spinks didn’t betray that anything unusual happened in her facial expressions.

             
The three of them pulled teacups in front of them and blew on the hot liquid, but didn’t say anything.

             
“Can we do it now?” Baggs asked. He looked around. “I mean, they’re having dinner guests. Wouldn’t we want to do it with less people here? That’s less people to stop us.”

             
Roger was standing up behind them, watching the humans with his electronic eyes.

             
Spinks nodded towards the K9. “If I take as much as one step inside the place I need to go, he’ll rip me to shreds.”

             
“Well this place will be crawling with K9s when dinner time rolls around,” whispered Larry, his eyes wide behind his spectacles. “Each of the girls has their own K9s, and this white one will probably stay here. That’ll be four. Right now there’s only one.”

             
“One’s enough to kill me, though!” Spinks spat back.

             
Baggs’s heart was thudding in his chest. This would be their only chance. He turned and looked at the K9. He could see the creature’s robotic hinges bulging out at all the places where a natural dog would have joints. Baggs thought that the robot’s motorized jaw would be able to bite with as much force as a lion’s jaw. Baggs rubbed his left shoulder, remembering the K9 that subdued him in Rolling Hills.

             
If Spinks takes too long, this thing will kill me,
he thought.

             
“I’ve got an idea,” he said to Spinks. “But you’ve got to work pretty damned fast. How much time will you need?”

“Five minutes? Ten? I honestly don’t know.”

“Well just go as fast as possible,” Baggs said and scooted his chair out from the table. “I’m going to make a diversion.”

             
“Wait!” Larry said. “Don’t you think that we should talk about this first?”

             
“No time.” Baggs didn’t push his chair back in. He walked the length of the dining room and pushed his large body through the swinging door that led to the kitchen. He had a hunch that he would find Cindi Turner alone in there. Roger followed the big man through the door.

             
Baggs heard Spinks scoot out of her chair and get going to work as the kitchen door swung shut behind him.

3

              Baggs was wrong about what he would find in the kitchen. Cindi wasn’t alone, as he had hoped. Baggs saw Byron and Gigi standing close to Cindi; the three of them were having a hushed conversation and it appeared as though Cindi and Byron were arguing with their daughter. Upon entering, Baggs heard Gigi say to her parents, “But he has children!” Tears were streaming down Gigi’s face from her eyes that were too far apart. Her fists were clenched and her arms were flexed as though she were about to hit someone.

             
Gigi’s large, black K9 was standing beside her. The robot’s head snapped to the side as Baggs entered. Baggs was distinctly aware that the machine’s titanium claws looked as sharp as razors.

             
“Go back into the dining room,” Byron Turner ordered Baggs. “We’re having a family discussion.”

             
But Baggs didn’t move. He stood his ground.

             
The kitchen was expansive. There were enough stovetops and ovens that a restaurant could operate from the Turner’s kitchen. There were pots and pans sizzling and bubbling on the stovetops, filling the air with the aroma of cooking onions and animal fat. Large metal vents snaked down from the white ceiling and sparkled as though they had just been cleaned. These appliances, along with a hefty metal door that led to a walk-in freezer, were on Baggs’s left. To Baggs’s right, there was an open pantry with shelves lined with bags of chips, cans of nuts, chocolate for baking, industrial bags of flower, granola bars, bottled water, bags of sugar, spices, containers of peanut butter, loafs of bread, and much more. The pantry was bigger than Baggs’s apartment. In front of Baggs, the room stretched out to a back wall that was completely covered in clean windows that looked out at the pristine lawn. The storm clouds had moved closer and it looked like nasty weather would soon reach the residence. The floors were made out of large, ornate red bricks that glistened uniformly with some kind of polish.

             
Upon seeing that Baggs wasn’t moving, Turner took three steps towards him over the brick floor and raised his voice: “I said
OUT!”

             
Baggs stepped forward, trying to think of a way to waste time. Roger was looking up at him, and Baggs knew that if he went back into the dining room that the K9 would go searching for Spinks and potentially stop her.

             
Standing there with Byron Turner yelling at him, Baggs felt that Spinks’s plan was too simple to work. It seemed bold and smart in practice, but now, while trying to execute it, it seemed childish and idealistic.

             
Spinks explained that she had gone to the bathroom while eating dinner in the Turner’s dining room last week, just as Baggs had, and that she had discovered a computing mainframe down the hall. Baggs had seen this also. Spinks explained that none of the K9s or electronics that were in the Turner’s house stored their own software. Rather, the strings of code that controlled the electronics were stored in a database and supplied to the appropriate appliances through a wireless transmission system. Spinks said that if Turner’s house was run on the applications she suspected, she would be able to shut down all of their technologies.

             
“Then,” she had told Baggs and Larry in the helicopter, “it’ll simply be a mad dash to get the hell out of there. Without operating K9s that can be sent out to catch us, we can probably hop over the neighboring fences, get onto a public road, and try to make it to somewhere safe.”

             
“But they’ll just catch us later!” Larry had protested. “They’ll send police after us and then we’d go to trial for ruining Turner’s software. That stuff must be expensive.”

             
Spinks had disagreed with this point. “No, we won’t be charged with anything. The software gets backed up on a 24-hour basis—most places do it at twelve in the morning. The software will be sent to some kind of a information cloud every night. Byron Turner probably will just have to go over to his database, click a few buttons, and his software will be restored—no harm done.”

             
“But he’ll still want to kill us. I mean, we’ll still know about the steroids,” Baggs had said.

             
Spinks had smiled slyly. “This whole thing is bigger than you think, Baggs. The way that society is set up now won’t last forever. I’m not the only hacker that’s gotten close to deleting the whole system and hitting reset on our entire way of life. Other people have gotten close too. And, if we can escape, I’m going to go underground for a while, bide my time, and then when the right opportunity arises, I’m going to reset it all. There will be no record of who owns what house, who has how many CreditCoins, or anything like that. The rich have power because of software. But when the software is all reset, that power goes away.”