Gotta Catch The Pretty Ones

© 2011-2014 by Mr. David R. Dorrycott

Chapter Forty Seven

It was early on Sunday morning and the only day that Sara did not open her shop, which was not unusual as very few Pokeshop’s opened on Sundays. Penny was busy with Patricia preparing breakfast while Sara carefully searched through the Pokeball programming as she did every morning when she found it, stumbled over it actually. A repeating piece of code that had interested her because of a bit of REM code just above it that she had run into twice before. Capture Code Six she read, which in itself was very unusual as all other rem’s had simply referred to the following subroutine as Capture Code.

Very slowly she started decoding what was nothing more than a strangely formatted mathematical code, in fact Penny had to drag her off the computer to get her to eat. Even so the poketech’s mind kept returning to that strange code, she had already run across thousands of mathematical subroutines but none had been so involved.

“What is it my love” Penny finally asked from across the table, noting her wife’s distracted look.

Sara looked up, only then realizing that she had been playing with her food. “I think that I found it, or part of it” the redhead answered. “At least it is nothing like anything I have run across before, for example does 398.0361 mean anything to you? It ends one of the REM lines.”

“Certainly” Penny answered, “300 is the Dewy Decimal system notation for social sciences, ninety is Customs, etiquette, folklore and eight is folklore. The rest refer to a specific book which is different in each library, the more books that you have the more subclassifications that you need. We certainly do not have a 0361 here though, we only go to point two in Folklore.”

“It can’t be that easy” Patricia added, “A library book code? For which library, which book, which secret?”

Penny shook her head yes, a smile on her face. After all neither Sara nor Patricia had any education in library sciences while it was her profession, one that she loved almost as much as her wife. “It’s easy to find out, I’ll simply go over to the library computer after breakfast and query that number. If anything pops up then you might have your answer, if nothing does then it has nothing to do with libraries but if something does pop up then I can request the book through interlibrary loan. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to get here.”

Sara ate a bit, her energy returning as the three of them formed a plan, any plan. “What if someone tagged that book so that anyone who asks for it is investigated?” she suggested.

Penny shrugged, Patricia seemed lost in thought for a moment then smiled. “I’ll just start an interest in folklore, I’ll even start writing a papers for the Vermilion City Folklore group. I’ve a huge gap in my memory that Waterman left, I could claim that the years I was gone might be a result in fairy folk using me. It will let people think that I am nothing but a nutcase, as long as I have you two and my pokeball I don’t much care what people think of me as long as they are not frightened of me.”

She gave her patented pokyeyed look that had Penny and Sara wanting to just rip her clothing off then and there. “Patty” Sara said softly, “I just discovered your special attack, the Dewy eyed look so please don’t use it on us too much, please?”

“But I have to train so I can level up” Patricia argued, laughter in her voice. “Why, like a Jigglypuff can put an entire town to sleep...”

“You will have that same town trying to get between your legs all at one time” Penny finished for her, “And that will leave us with nothing but bloody scraps to hold.”

Patricia just laughed, “Lets finish breakfast then Sara can clean up while you and I go over to the library to check out all the folklore books that are here then beg for more.”

And that was exactly what happened, eventually the two returned with exactly three books to find Sara busy at the screen, a notebook beside her. “And?” Penny asked.

“I believe that I have a command code that should let me into the core circuits” Sara announced in an awed voice. “One hundred and twenty four characters. Numbers, capital and small letters plus half a dozen invalid characters all mixed together.” She looked at her notebook, then the Poketech work system she was using. “Penny, didn’t we find an old work system when we cleaned up? I can’t trust that this one might be saving information for the inspectors so I need one that I can work on at the house and not need to let them know about. As long as I don’t connect it to the data lines it will be fine.”

“Two if I remember, though I don’t know if either works” the librarian answered.

That information brought a big smile to the techs face, “Good, then lets dig them up, take them to the new house and hook up one of those type sevens that the Constable brought over. I want to see if this is real or a trap.”

“And me?” Patricia asked.

“Keep looking sexy, answer the door or phone and start that paper of yours” Sara decided. “Mainly keep looking sexy and please keep bringing me coffee.”

Patricia smiled, waved and headed for the table to set up her cover work while listening at the nearby basement doorway, but first there was the coffee to prepare. Deep inside she knew that she should be angry for what Penny had done to her, yet when she balanced that anger against the absolute fear that Waterman had planted in her soul she decided that being bound to Sara and the pokeball was a much better fate than living a life of abject fear at every noise, she might even have ended up in a sanatorium. So she preformed the tiny duty of preparing coffee with a true smile in her heart. Besides, Sara was honestly working hard to discover a way to release her and the other women from those balls, safe as they might be. Even if Sara was successful and rescued her from the balls control she would always have Sara and Penny after all. They had been the only ones she had thought of in that storm, the only ones that she knew could protect her from the mad Waterman and they had.

Meanwhile down in the shops basement Penny carefully removed two thin wooden boxes from the shelves that the widow Mrs. Martine had built for them, at a fair price Sara remembered. Taking them one at a time to the single wooden worktable Penny carefully unpacked everything. “Looks like the keyboards are trash” she reported as she examined each piece that she removed. “Monitors are ancient too, can we replace them?”

Examining the monitors data cable Sara bit her upper lip. “B-Video” she explained, “eight bit grey scale. No ones made this kind of thing in thirty plus years, I can probable get a card to adapt to a newer technology but these things have a dial up modem installed.” She opened one of the drawers built into the table and rummaged around, finally locating the tool that she needed. “Lets open this one up first and see what we have” she instructed her love. They were speaking softly, almost reverently as they explored.

It took Penny a few minutes to discover how the old machine was put together, still she had two hands to Sara’s one so the job had become hers. “There isn’t any poison gas in this thing is there?” she asked as she removed still shining screws.

“No Penny but” Sara answered, reaching over and carefully removing the red and white pokeball her wife wore, for exactly the same reasons that Patricia wore hers. “But if there is, I’ll save you.” She had a smile on her face when she said that, unaware that Penny was wondering who would save her Sara.

Eventually the ancient workstation was open on the table, Penny writing down what Sara was saying as the tech went through the thing. “It has to be forty years old” Sara observed, “They haven’t made that CPU in at least that long.”

“Can you upgrade it?” Penny asked.

“I don’t think so but this one only has the minimal memory, I’ll have to double check but I think that its O/S could support four times what it came with. That would help a lot, the I/O card for Pokeballs has the same connector, that is a standard that the law will not let change since everything about Pokeball’s has to be backwards compatible to version one. It certainly makes tech’s lives easier.” She used the flashlamp from another drawer to look around, “Remarkably clean” she noted, “But these power supply capacitors are swollen, we will need new ones.”

Penny added those items to her list, a list that was getting longer every minute. “Sara, all these parts are going to take time and money, why not just build your own from, what do they call it, a whitebox?”

“Because of two things” Sara answered. She gently pried a board from the motherboard, setting it on as grounded metal plate. “This and the O/S. The O/S runs everything and only Poketech’s can possess it. We can’t even own a backup copy of it and this” she gently touched the card that was dominated by a black rectangle over half an inch thick. “Tells the O/S that it is in a legal machine, it won’t run otherwise. Without those two items you have nothing better than a research computer.”

“So other than that probably dead hard drive, what else is the O/S on?” Penny asked, curious. “I mean, if you had to rebuild from a crash what would you do?”

“Crystal drives don’t crash Penny” Sara answered, “They can corrupt though, in that case I take the corrupted crystal drive back to the nearest Guild House, that would be Warren Hill and their techs reload it or replace it. In this case considering the age, if the crystal has corrupted somehow they would replace it.”

“Uh huh” Penny looked at the pile of scrap and the two items that Sara had just explained. “So, if you have this” she said, pointing at the card, “And this” she pointed at the drive. “What does it matter what machine its put in?”

Sara looked at the two items, then up at her still standing wife. “A brain” she answered very softly, then let her head drop down onto one of the keyboards. “I’m sending you to Warren Hill tomorrow” Sara said, her head still on the keyboard. “Let some young geek sell you some crap computer then bring it home Thursday.”

Leaning down Penny placed her lips next to Sara’s ear. “Patricia could use a computer” she whispered, “For her crazy work, so can I for my recipes and stories. I bet that you need one for yourself. You and she can convert the house computer to what you need while I am gone.”

“Why me” Sara asked from her odd position,.

“Because you are so easy? Patricia’s here with coffee.”

“Coffee!” Sara repeated, lifting her head from the keyboard. “Must have coffee!” She waited until the raven haired woman had placed her mugs on the table thus leaving her hands free. “And Patricia” Sara continued, shoving her face into the other woman’s belly, blowing had to make a motor sound.

Laughter quickly filled the basement workshop, Sara’s serious mood washing away under the other two’s following tickle attack.