Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page A

now.” Still grinning, she spun back to her computer.
    I headed for the door, feeling grumpy. As I dragged it open, I ran into two kids about sixteen years old heading up the iron stairway. They were both a bit scruffy and not particularly well-dressed, and when they saw me they froze and stared like startled deer.
    “You’ve got visitors,” I called.
    “Is that Katrina and Justin?” Pilar’s voice came from behind me. “Cas! Stop being all menacing; they’re here to see Arthur. Come on in, guys.”
    Justin was a light-skinned black kid, Katrina an unsmiling Asian girl with bangs and freckles. They squeezed past me, keeping their heads down. I pressed back to let them by. I hadn’t meant to be intimidating.
    Pilar gave Justin a hug—Katrina hung back—and then gestured both kids to visitors’ chairs. Feeling distinctly like a fifth wheel, I slunk out and down the steps.
    The sensation of being watched still tugged at me. I glanced back up at Arthur’s office, then around the street. The sidewalk was empty save for one pedestrian, a dark-haired man who shuffled by without taking any notice of me. This was starting to bother me—not the idea that someone might be following me, but the feeling of it. I didn’t get feelings. I saw quantifiable data that translated into probabilities.
    Maybe I was jumpy. I wasn’t one to get jumpy without numerical reason—but then, everything had gone sideways and fucked lately. I sighed, headed back to my car, and drove to Van Nuys.
    I found Checker in the Hole this time. The converted garage behind his house gave the impression of being modeled after a hacker cave in a comic book; monitors tiled the walls and a city of computer towers surrounded his nest of keyboards in the middle. Usually he didn’t stop typing as I walked in, but today when I opened the door his fingers stuttered to a halt and he turned to face me. “Hi,” he said.
    “Hi.”
    The awkwardness of the morning crept over us again.
    He coughed. “I, uh, I’ve started the statistical analyses you asked for. You didn’t give me much to go on as to what you wanted, so I’m crunching a lot of different data a lot of different ways. I’ll keep sending you more as I finish.”
    “Uh. No rush,” I said. I hitched myself up to perch on a piece of desktop between computer towers. “I have some stuff to figure out before I can use them anyway.”
    “What’s your plan?” asked Checker curiously. “Do you need any other help with it?”
    “Come to think of it, population data,” I said. “As fine-grained as possible over LA.”
    “Oh, sure, that’s easy.” He spun to one of his keyboards and started clacking away at it. “No problem. I’ll send it with the first batch of data. What are you using it for?”
    “Arkacite was developing some sort of frequency generator that would disrupt people’s brains so they wouldn’t succumb to peer pressure or go all mob-like,” I said. “I want to finish it and then distribute them around LA.” Hopefully their problem had only been the math. “It won’t solve everything, but I’m hoping to leach out at least some of the mindless violence.”
    Checker froze. “ That’s how you’re planning to fight crime?”
    “Smart, huh?”
    Checker spoke like he was choosing his words very carefully. “You want to mess with people’s heads?”
    “Only when they’re getting sucked into groupthink,” I said. “Think how much violence goes on because of gangs, or because of people following along and getting their pleasure centers activated by joining the herd. I’m hoping to counter that.” Checker didn’t look as excited as I expected. “What?”
    “It’s just—you’re mucking around with people’s brains, you know?”
    “To make them less dangerous.”
    “Except you can’t—changing people’s brain chemistry to make them more peaceful—it’s, it’s not right. Please don’t get mad at me for saying this, okay? But let’s think of something