There was another awkward silence for a while, then Kevin said, “We better take some of this down to Jane. She’s not going to remember to eat.”
Marie visibly swallowed a comment, but she did pick up a pizza box and tramp down the stairs after us. I carried the juice.
Jane had the machine disassembled and neatly spread out on a bench, almost like an exploded diagram or one of those “some assembly required” charts. She was pointing her laptop at it. The laptop flashed.
“What are you doing?” asked Kevin.
“Three-D scan,” she said. She put the laptop down on another bench and fiddled with it, and a projected holographic image of the parts, several times life-size, appeared in the air above the laptop. She started moving the projected parts around by grabbing them with her hands.
I knew it wouldn’t do any good to question how the laptop could do that. In her mind, that was what a laptop should do. I’d never seen her charge the battery, come to that. She didn’t even seem to have a power cord. The power here was a different voltage anyway, I suspected, and had different plugs, but that just didn’t seem to be a consideration.
“We brought you pizza,” Kevin said, approaching with a box.
“Oh,” she replied, and picked up a slice. She took an absent-minded bite, then put it down and continued to fiddle with the projection. I got the impression that first bite was also going to be her last.
We put the pizza boxes and juice bottles down on an unused workbench and stood around watching for a little while as Jane reassembled an image of the machine in midair. Abruptly, Karen burst out, “I could really do with a shower.”
We looked at her. She was right.
Marie took two steps to the nearest door and opened it without really looking, still distracted by Jane’s projection. I poked my head in curiously.
“Hey, this is a Japanese bath-house,” I said.
“You over-delivered,” said Kevin. We walked in and looked around. It was all wooden slats and minimalism. There were two separate bathing areas, presumably for men and women.
Karen appeared hesitantly at the door. “I’ve read about these,” she said. “You wash yourself down first and then soak, right?”
“Right,” I said. I know my manga. “Which side do you want?”
Kevin had to repeat it before she heard, but she chose the left. She dragged Marie away from the light show and they vanished through the door.
Kevin and I went through our door and stripped off, washed and then climbed into the square wooden bath.
“Pretty nice,” I said. “MIBs do good work.”
“They do,” he agreed.
We heard giggling from next door, and I tried hard not to think about Karen taking her clothes off. I recited some nonsense poetry in my head. It helped a little, but not much.
We sat and soaked for a while. We could hear the girls talking, though we couldn’t pick up most of what they were saying, and we started chatting too. We’d just fallen silent for a moment when I heard Karen’s Australian voice quite clearly through the wall.
“Who’s Kevin talking to in there?”
“The other guy, uh…” Marie had forgotten my name again, but unlike Karen had at least remembered my existence.
I was just preparing a fulminating curse when Kevin gave a start.
“What?” I asked.
“Powers are off,” he said.
“What the…?” I heard Karen exclaim. “My head just went quiet. It’s like that… place.”
“Jane!” Marie bellowed.
“Don’t worry,” Jane shouted back, “I just turned the machine back on.”
“OK,” called Marie. “You want a Japanese bath?”
“Why not?” Jane called back.
“Bring the pizza and the juice,” Karen suggested.
“What pizza – oh.” She’d forgotten it was there. It was me pizza.
A few moments later, I heard Jane walk in and stop in front of the two doors.
“Left-hand door,” I called out, and she heard me without Kevin’s help. I heard the other door open and the two other girls explain the wash-before-you-soak thing.
“What if we get attacked?” Karen asked nervously. “I mean, we’re all in here with no powers. And, uh, no clothes.” I started reciting nonsense poetry again until I realised that I didn’t have to – she couldn’t read my thoughts now.
“I’ve got a remote kill-switch right here. I’ll rig it up to some motion detectors while we sleep.”
“You’re going to run the machine while we sleep?”
“I call it Operation Bootstrap. Tomorrow morning we should all have built up a power backlog, and I can use that to do the next step. It’s going to be brilliant.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Karen.
“If I knew that now,” said Jane, “I wouldn’t need to turn on the machine.”
Jane sounded happy, even almost friendly. She was even explaining in terms we could all understand. Maybe the bath was relaxing her, or maybe it was just that her project was underway.
After a while in which nobody talked, there was the sound of someone who was too hot hauling herself out of the water to sit on the side.
“My goodness, Jane,” said Marie, “watch yourself, you’ll cut your fingers on those hip-bones. Have some pizza.”
Even relaxed, Marie could be a bit of a bitch.
We soaked ourselves prunelike, then dried off – there were some towels – dressed, and went upstairs to our improvised beds. Hot soaks are really relaxing. Despite the drawbacks of the air mattress, I slept like a rock.
When I woke up, it was because Karen had just landed on top of me.
Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
