Blow Me Down Read Free Page B

make officer. It’s a goal. You like goals; you’re always telling me to have them.” She hurried on before I could point out that the two things weren’t the same. “If you advance in the game to officer status, I’ll know you really kept an open mind.”
    “How hard is achieving officerhood?” I asked, flipping to a spreadsheet of the current year’s budget.
    “Piece of cake. I was an officer in, like . . . well . . . really quickly.”
    I knew how those computer games worked—to advance you had to open a secret passageway or collect some object or run over a magic spot or something silly like that. It shouldn’t be much of a challenge, and if it kept the peace, it would be worth the sacrifice of my time. “Hmm. All right, since it means so much to you, I will give the game an hour or so and become an officer.”
    “Woohoo! You can use my laptop—it has the game client on it already. I’ll bring it and the VR parts down here right now. You can play on the battery so you don’t have to be plugged into the wall in case the power goes out. Thanks, Mom!” She gave me a quick hug before running out of the room. “I’m going to go tell my captain really quickly that you’re logging on later, so if he sees you he’ll be nice to you and stuff.”
    “Wait. Tara, I didn’t mean this second—oy.” The door to her bedroom upstairs slammed. I started to roll my eyes again but switched to a flinch when another loud peal of thunder and gust of wind made the windows rattle. As quickly as I could I finished typing up the press release, e-mailed copies of it to the organization’s director, the media contacts, and my work e-mail address, then made a quick backup of all my recent work.
    “You are so anal it’s not even funny,” Tara said fifteen minutes later as she deposited her laptop on my desk, plugging the power cord into the wall. On top of it sat a pair of thick black wraparound glasses.
    I filed the CDs I’d burned with the week’s work away with the other backups, one in the collection organized by date, the other in the one organized by subject. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth having backed up. Why are you plugging that in? The storm is almost on top of us.”
    We both were silent while another flash-boom! shook the house.
    “I don’t get a good connection to log on to the system on the battery. It’s just to log on. Once you’re into the game, you can unplug it. Here is the VR unit. Cool, huh? Looks just like a pair of shades. There’re speakers built into the part of the glasses that sits behind your ears, so you hear everything, and here”—she flipped down a fiber-optic-sized black extension from the sides of the glasses—“here is your microphone. The software has speech recognition capabilities, so you can talk to other characters just like you normally would. It’s so totally cool.”
    “Uh-huh,” I said, trying to avoid her as she shoved the glasses toward my face, but it was useless. A few seconds later I was wearing the VR glasses. “I can’t see anything.”
    “They’re not turned on. Here, let me do it. Okay, you’re set. Gotta go do the rest of my homework before we lose the lights,” Tara called over her shoulder as she hurried out of the room. “It’s all set up for you to log on with a new name, and I told Bart to watch out for you. Oh, and I put you on the list of workers at my weavery, so you can look around there. Have fun!”
    “Hey! Don’t think I don’t see through your hit-and-run tactics! I know full well what you’re doing!” I sighed as her laughter spilled down the stairs after her. “Manipulative little so-and-so,” I muttered as I turned my attention to the colorful screen that seemed to float in the air before me.
    A game client screen that read “Welcome to Buckling Swashes. Please log in or create a new pirate to enter the game” blinked slowly at me.
    “Right. Let’s get this over with.” I reached out somewhat blindly for the