Work Text:
BridgePort Pub • Portland, Oregon
“The whole thing is sketchy as hell,” Nate said flatly. “You’re talking about a client none of us have ever so much as seen, and it’s not even really our kind of gig. Until we find the one specific obsolete PC your friend is after, there’s no mark – and even then, likely as not nothing to steal. It’d be simpler to just buy the damned thing off whoever’s got it for what, fifty bucks tops?”
Hardison shrugged. “Could be a few hundred,” he said. “There’s not much of a collectors’ market for vintage computers, but the one we’re talking about might qualify. As for Red Hat – okay, we’ve only ever met online, but we go back a really long way, and they’ve always been solid. Straight data, clean code, first-rate tech, never any monkeyshines on the business side. I’m thinking this is more a favor than a job, I guess.”
“Remind me,” Sophie said, “why they want this one specific doorstop in the first place.”
“It was part of a TV series, years back,” Hardison said. “Used onscreen for establishing shots, also used by the in-house SFX crew and production staff. That’s where the one-of-a-kind part comes in. From what Red Hat says, it must have been customized six ways from Sunday – maybe both hardware and software mods, they’re not sure. Either way, the thing is, now there’s talk about rebooting the show, and they need to find that box and see exactly what’s in it.”
Eliot set down the mug he’d been drying. “A computer that old, what are the odds it’s even still intact? By now you’d think it would’ve been broken down for parts or compacted into scrap.”
“Red Hat says not,” replied Hardison. “That much they’re sure of, don’t ask how. Apparently there’s a program on it that’s still running in really deep background, and their server can still pick up the activity. Nothing as clean as a DNS address, but enough to tell the box is still out there.”
Parker swallowed the last bite of the sandwich Eliot had set in front of her a few minutes earlier – smoked salmon, arugula, heirloom tomato, and melted smoked brie folded into a slender baguette. “Spectacular,” she told Eliot.
Then she swung to face Nate. “We have to do this. We totally have to do this.”
Nate blinked. “Why?”
“Because Carmen Sandiego is the greatest thief of all time, of course. Even if the writers did kind of water her down a little in the last season.”
Nate blinked again. “Wait, what…Carmen who?”
“Sandiego,” said Hardison with a sigh. “Started out as boss lady in a series of computer games, where she’d steal the Grand Canyon or the Sphinx and dare you to catch her. The cartoon came later–"
“–and what I want to know,” Parker put in, “is why you never told me about having a buddy with a Carmen connection.”
“Didn’t know I had one till last week,” Hardison said mildly. “I always thought the Red Hat ID was a Linux callout. Also – do not laugh – I kind of missed the animated series, back in the day. My Carmen was the game show on public TV, the one with the seriously doo-wop theme song.”
Eliot’s fingers were snapping as he broke out a beat. “Steal their Seoul in South Korea, make Antarctica cry Uncle…” Hardison grinned and picked it up. Parker sat glaring at them both – but then broke out laughing when both Sophie and Nate chimed in on the signature line:
“Tell me, where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”
Sophie was giggling, too. “I crossed paths with Rockapella a time or two in New York, after that number went all earworm.”
“And what’s with the ‘Carmen who’ routine?” Parker demanded, eyeing Nate suspiciously.
The mastermind shrugged. “Sam was really into the game show. I never saw the cartoon either, so none of those details registered for me.”
“We can fix that,” said Parker firmly. “There are videos.”
“Noted,” Nate said. “Still. This is a fictional character we’re discussing, people. Do we really want to go on a scavenger hunt for one unique but obsolete computer that’s maybe worth its weight in plastic, on the off chance there’s something on it the reboot writers can use?”
Parker gave him her fiercest look. “Hell, yes. Carmen’s the patron saint of thieves, and that would be us.”
Hardison nodded. “How can I not be in? It’ll be kind of like playing the games for real.”
Eliot gave him an odd look. “Could be we’re doing just that. I remember those framing sequences – the it’s-a-game aspect was baked right into the cartoon setup. And what other program would still be running on that specific machine? With that much time to work on strategy, any surviving version of Carmen is gonna be a stone bitch to beat.”
Sophie’s expression was thoughtful. “You’re assuming Carmen would be the mark. The way I read it, more likely she’s the client – or at least her writers are, which comes to the same thing. I think Hardison’s right; this reads more like a favor than a regular job. And Parker’s right too – given a choice, let’s pick the one that puts the patron saint of thieves on our good side.”
“Even if she’s a fictional character?” Nate asked.
Sophie grinned at him. “Of course. All the best saints are made up, anyway.”
Nate sighed. “Oh, all right,” he said. “In that case, let’s go steal – um, rescue a saint.”
#
One of Hardison's computer lairs
Hardison didn’t normally invite guests into his personal workspaces – but this was an unusual situation. He’d therefore set up what amounted to a viewing party. The Where on Earth computer was set up on a well-lit worktable along one side of the room, isolated from most of the other electronic hardware. Meanwhile, the rest of Leverage, Inc. sat in a shadowed row of armchairs in the opposite half of the room, their eyes shifting from the vintage system to one or another of the three oversize monitors mounted on the wall behind Hardison – displaying, respectively, the computer, Hardison himself, and the image of a red fedora.
“You’ve got the machine?” The voice Red Hat was using – mellow, but clearly synthesized – betrayed more than a note of anticipation.
“Right here,” Hardison said cheerfully. “Box, keyboard, mouse, monitor, power cube – custom job, that; battery backup is built in. I tell you, though, that is one very strange PC. It’s home-built for sure; there are Radio Shack part numbers on some of the hardware. Technically, the system’s powered down completely – except for what looks like some kind of background program running somewhere in virtual memory, and if I’m right, it’s been active since at least 1996. Maybe longer. Besides being impossible just in general, something like that should’ve overheated or blown out the motherboard years ago, and no battery pack made that long ago should still have juice. But my thermal sensors say otherwise – there’s the faintest bit of live current in there someplace, and yet the interior CPU temperature is totally within sleep-mode range.”
“You haven’t opened the box, have you?” The voice turned abruptly sharp.
“Not a screw has been loosened. Bring up your video feed and see for yourself,” said Hardison. “All my scans have been passive. I do have the peripherals connected and the system ready to boot, but when – pardon me, if that happens, it’ll be off network on its own circuit. And of course this box is old enough that wifi’s not in play.”
I hope, he added silently. He’d taken every standard precaution to isolate the system, but Hardison’s tech-senses were running on high alert. He’d kept his promises to Red Hat about not tampering with any of the components, but he’d also spent several hours peering at the vintage system’s innards through the eye of a supremely tiny medical-grade probe camera, and come away with contradictory results.
Hardison was fairly sure that nobody had, in fact, opened up the CPU in at least the past decade – and that he’d need a power tool to loosen the relevant screws if and when the time came. Yet there wasn’t nearly as much dust inside the CPU as there should have been in the circumstances, and a handful of internal components – a chip here, a connector there, a third hard drive where none should have been, and a tiny sealed cube inside the power supply – simply did not belong in a computer dating from the late 1990s.
“Of course,” came Red Hat’s voice, neutral again.
“Well, then,” Hardison said, “I guess it’s time to set up delivery – or pickup, if you’d rather. If this system is as unique as you’ve been saying, I’d hate to trust it to FedEx or UPS.”
“A point,” said Red Hat. “If you’ll just give me a moment to bring up the necessary contact information….”
“Absolutely,” said Hardison.
The team sat in silence, watching what at first appeared to be a complete lack of action. Then, slowly, the vintage computer and its peripherals took on the ghost of a soft, pink glow…and lost it again. The pink pulse happened for a second time, then a third – and as the last of the three pulses died away, a soft Pop! noise sounded and the computer’s diskette drive buzzed briefly.
Hardison and his teammates looked at one another. “What in Hell was that supposed to be?” he asked. “Red Hat-?”
Parker and Sophie were exchanging whispers. “Was that – a C-5 aura?” Parker inquired.
“Impossible,” Sophie countered.
“But– “
Red Hat’s synthesized voice interrupted. “I was afraid of that. The programming allows for the operational function, but not for remote execution.”
Hardison eyed their contact’s icon on the wall display. “I don’t think I even want to know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Except it sounds like you need me to run a program on this end.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” said Red Hat. “The command software is straightforward, but the coordinates and associated parameters require extreme precision. Mr. Hardison, go ahead and power up the system. Launch Game Command from the desktop, then click the button labeled Beacon in the upper left corner of the subsequent screen.”
“And then?”
“Watch and learn, Mr. Hardison. Watch and learn.”
As Hardison moved to follow Red Hat’s instructions, Eliot rose and moved to shadow him. Nate also stood up, while Parker and Sophie scooted their chairs together and watched. After just a few moments, the vintage computer system completed a surprisingly brief startup routine and displayed a sedate desktop menu.
“Nonstandard OS,” muttered Hardison. “Might have known.” He moused to the icons Red Hat had specified, tapped each in turn, and stepped quickly back across the room to scoop up a handheld control unit.
Thirty seconds ticked themselves off in silence. Then:
Instead of the earlier soft pink, a bright, flat, white-speckled pink disk of light with a slight purple cast erupted in the center of the room. Out of it stepped a tall female figure garbed in a red jumpsuit, black boots, a wide black leather belt, and a black-ribboned crimson fedora.
Parker’s expression was one of stunned delight. “Carmen Sandiego!”
Their visitor sketched a slight bow. “I trust you’ll forgive the lack of a trench coat. It just isn’t practical for the sort of work I’m doing nowadays.”
Hardison, meanwhile, was merely stunned. “Seriously!? Seriously!?”
Eliot, as usual, was taking stock of the newcomer. “You’re not animated.”
Carmen chuckled. “Never confuse the interface with the reality behind it,” she said. “That said, I am a hologram…on this side of the portal. That’s what the original C-5 was designed for, since most of the game detectives are computer avatars.”
“So it’s not actually a teleporter?” That was Sophie, sounding puzzled.
“Originally, no,” said Carmen, “though it’s been upgraded since. The energy overhead for matter transmission is insanely high, especially for cross-dimensional transits. Pure data transfer is much easier and more practical.”
She turned to Hardison. “I appreciate your restraint. You’re welcome to make use of anything your probes picked up – don’t apologize, I’d have peeked myself – though some of the reactions may work differently in this universe.”
Hardison blinked and nodded. Meanwhile, Eliot was smiling crookedly and talking to Nate. “I told you we might be playing the game for real.” He turned toward Carmen, his expression more serious. “I’m thinking it hasn’t been as much fun for you.”
Carmen Sandiego nodded. “In an ordinary world, it isn’t given to mere mortals to know the nature of their own reality. Not so in mine. I knew, sleeping and waking, that I was a chess-piece in a game, not merely born to play but bound by the game’s rules and constraints.”
Hardison broke in. “Like Professor Moriarty, in that pair of Star Trek episodes. Assuming you have Star Trek, that is.”
“Oh, yes,” Carmen said. “And where my opponents in ACME – the Chief, Zack, Ivy, and so on – were defined early on as computer avatars, I was physically alive in the world of the game. And at first, that was enough.”
“Except,” Eliot said, slowly, “that your life was built around the idea of the Player – the kid behind the computer in the framing sequences – always being there. And after awhile, after the TV series in our world ended, your Player went away.”
Parker’s eyes had gone wide and rounded. “Oh my God. And – depending on how the ACME guys were programmed, they might all have gone offline, waiting to be called back up.”
“The detectives, yes,” Carmen told her. “The Chief held out for a year or two, but after that the software began to de-stabilize, and he went into stasis to avoid losing memory integrity. As for me – without the Player and ACME as foils, thievery rather lost its thrill. And over time, the world itself began to grow dull and stagnant.”
Nate finally levered himself up from the armchair he’d been occupying. “So what brings you to us?”
Carmen gave him a sidewise look. “What do you think? I’m here to steal a universe.”
“Hah,” said Nate, as the rest of the team made a variety of amused noises. “Technically, it’s not stealing if it was your universe to start with.”
“But it wasn’t,” Hardison said, “Technically, the cartoon-series universe belongs to the company in our reality that made the cartoon. Except we don’t usually think of fictional universes as, well, real, which kind of makes a difference.”
“Indeed,” said Carmen. “Luckily, I had certain advantages that I suspect my television writers didn’t intend to give me. Specifically, by the end of your world’s television series, I had a reliable, working time machine – and the mathematical research that went into creating it. I didn’t especially want to travel further afield in time–“
Hardison snapped his fingers. “But if the right math will let you move forward and back on a ‘time’ axis, then it should also let you move up and down on a ‘reality’ axis.”
Carmen nodded. “A highly simplified formulation, but essentially accurate. Over time, I was able to isolate the precise axis connecting my native ‘fictional’ universe and that where its creators originated. Without the Player to interfere, I’ve been able to make a series of remote modifications to the host computer’s programming, and now it’s ready for the final step.”
Parker’s forehead wrinkled. “Only you’re not really rebooting the old cartoon, are you?”
Eliot shook his head, looking worried. “I hope not. Rebooting an entire universe–“
“Good Lord, no,” Carmen said. “I can’t fully disconnect the two universes from one another, not without losing far too much shared history. What I want is to shut down the original game software – but not before I’ve copied and transferred the character data to a separate channel. But as you saw, the system wouldn’t give me the access I needed to do that remotely.”
“Character data,” Nate repeated. “That would be–“
“The Chief, and Zack, and Ivy,” Parker said. “Because whatever the writers may have had in mind originally, for all practical purposes they’re as real as Carmen is.” She glanced at each of her colleagues in turn. “
“That’s it precisely,” said Carmen. “And from here, working from the original source code, I can give them as much reality – and freedom – as I have.”
“More like a happy beginning than a happy ending, then,” Sophie observed.
Carmen’s lips turned upward in a tentative smile. “I very much hope so.”
Hardison tapped a couple of keystrokes on his own system and looked up. “Yes, well, now that I have a tiny bit of an idea what I’m looking at – I think my hardware is telling me that having you hanging out up here, hologram or not, is putting a lot of stress on local reality. If you’ve got the code-moxie to take that computer off our hands...”
“…then I’d best steal myself a universe and be off.” Carmen turned, stepped briskly over to the vintage game-control computer, plucked a diskette from a pocket, and slid it into the system’s drive.
“By the way,” she added, glancing over her shoulder at Parker, “once this is done I expect to change careers. After all, once you’ve stolen a universe, what do you do for an encore?” She began typing furiously away at the keyboard as the system booted.
Parker blinked. “Oh? So we don’t get a favor back after all?”
“I’m sure I can manage something,” Carmen said, laughing. As she spoke, pink-and-purple light gathered around her, then flared with a bright, exuberant bang!! – and when the flash faded, thief and computer had both vanished, leaving the worktable wholly bare and dust-free. On the wall, the “Red Hat” icon in the rightmost monitor blinked and disappeared…
…and after a moment, a diamond-shaped ACME logo popped up in its place.
“Game over,” Eliot said quietly. “Winner – Carmen Sandiego.”
Nate glanced over at Hardison. “You’re still going to keep an ear on that comm frequency, right?”
“Hell, yes,” Hardison replied. “I’ve still got a lot of questions about how this reality-axis stuff works. I mean, if this Carmen was real, what about the one from the game show?”
“Shows, you mean,” came a familiar voice from the room’s speaker system. “We met, briefly, but she’s retired now, too.”
Parker plopped back into her armchair. “But if you’re retiring, then who gets to be the patron saint of thieves?”
The laugh from Carmen Sandiego sounded positively mischievous. “Oh, that’s easy – I’m nominating you five. You’ll want to watch for more visitors going forward, I should think.”
# # #