“You,” snapped Rod, deeply wounded by the condescension, and pointed his finger at the little girl, “call me, a child?”
Cee turned to her older sister and tilted her head to the side, her long blonde hair falling to the floor. Rod let out a surprise yelp as he noticed the sudden growth of her hair, for it reminded him of the protagonist out of his favourite Disney movie, Tangled.
“Why are you so interested in him, Lena?” asked Cee.
Lena put a finger to her lip and pondered for a moment. “I think he’s the one,” she said finally.
“The one?” repeated Rod dumbly.
“You think?” said Cee with an even dumbfounded expression as the young student. “But, I mean, look at this fatass idiot. He’s a drooling, pathetic creep. I bet he’s never even had a girlfriend.”
“I have so had a girlfriend!” he cried. “And besides,” he added, crossing his arms with a defiant and smug expression, “I am beyond material possessions anyway.”
“Oh, so women are property to you?” Cee retorted with a prominently raised eyebrow.
Rod’s face contorted into one of pain, his eyes bulging out of his sockets and his face a tomato, as he breathlessly exclaimed, launching his arms into the air, “Why you – Where the hell are your sisters anyway?”
“Listen,” said Lena, stepping in between the squabbling pair, her doc martins slapping the concrete with each step, “you’re after SystemCare aren’t you?”
“What?” squeaked Rod, and he reached to the back of his neck with his hand and scratched it and laughed uneasily.
“Here,” said Lena, feeling in the pocket of her biker jacket and finding several dozen twenty-pound notes, “here, take it and go now; I’ll tell Aleku you had to leave for a family emergency. Turn back now before it is too late.”
“Sweetie, sweetie,” said Rod smugly, slapping his hands together and puffing out his chest. “How the tables have turned-”
“I can tell that you’re a good man,” said Lena with a sigh.
“Ach, ach, give me a break! You two are weirding me out!” Rod felt his heart rapidly beat in his chest and his right leg twitched nervously as it always did when he was afraid. He became increasingly self-conscious when he noticed Lena’s eyes upon it.
“Ah, you are not a man like other men, it is obvious, right Cee? A man like him is like no other man I have ever met or seen or read about. One must question whether he really is a man, for who acts like this and is called a man? I think that he can be trusted with the knowledge.”
“What knowledge? I have so many questions right now that you aren’t answering.”
“I figured,” said Lena, “and your questions will be answered in due time; but right now, right now there’s no time. You’re here for the System, well…here it is,” and she struck out her hand towards the block of supercomputers.
Rod narrowed his eyes in suspicion, and pursed his lips, and said, “What is going on?”
Lena clicked her tongue in frustration, a pained expression on her glowing face, which reflected the array of blue and red swirling lights coming from the data towers. “I would love to tell you all everything right now, but…even though we are safe right now in the basement, there’s no telling if he…,”she said, trailing off, sharply turning her head to the door they had come through. “I have to talk to you in a way that if anyone was overhearing this conversation they would have to be of an intelligence and curious sort to understand; do you understand?”
“Not quite,” admitted Rod.
“Good,” replied Lena, and she looked over her shoulder quickly at her little sister, before turning back around to the strange, dumbfounded man. “You’re a smart man, take the money and run.”
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Rod looked at the bundle of notes in the young girl’s hand and considered for a moment. “This…this isn’t really worth anything.”
“What?” said Lena with a confused expression. “This is money: everyone wants money.”
“Yes, but I keep my expenses low and my debts high, so a bundle of notes wouldn’t be worth the gain I could get by being the personal friend of one of the richest men in the world.”
“My…you really are strange. If this is not satisfactory, I can have wired to you all that I have available in my possession. How about that? Would that not satisfy you? You must leave before you -”
Rod cupped his chin like an intellectual, considering for a moment the girl’s proposition. He had always been a man to question the surface of things, and wondering why this teenage girl was trying to get rid of him. But…how much was she really willing to give him?
“How much?” said he.
“I’m not quite sure how much,” began Lena with a puzzled expression, “everything is on credit these days. Err, what about a few million?”
Rod opened his eyes fully all of a sudden, looked at her like a deer in headlights, a face as white as a ghost, as though what she had said could only be said in a dream and nowhere else, in a fantastical escapist type of dream… His mouth hung open.
“Now, will you leave? Leave here, and never come back. The money will enter your bank account in a few days. Don’t worry, my friend’s father owns the major banks so there’ll be no money laundering queries are anything. Just go now, please; and obviously, never speak about this to anyone. Understood?”
Rod’s mouth was still open, his jaw hanging slack. He could retire on that amount. He could finally quit his medical degree and do whatever he wanted…people love a millionaire.
“The more important thing is,” interjected Cee, “to keep quiet about all this and to leave without saying anything to anybody. You’ll never see Aleku or any of his friends again. You’ll drop this silly notion of revenge, of changing the past, of being anything than you already are. Capiche?”
Perhaps these children had many come before him seeking after the technology, and knowing how tremendously valuable it is, are willing to throw millions of pounds away to keep it in their possession. His legs seemed to act in accordance with their own self-interest, as opposed to his own, for they began to buckle underneath him as he turned towards the exit in some sort of nervous excitement or other. A full set of yellow teeth appeared on his face against his own better judgement, and his mind was beset by fanciful imaginations of his new life. “Oh, God,” he spluttered to himself, his forehead almost translucent with glistening sweat, when he had reached the door. He looked over his shoulder with giddiness, his chest heaving like an exhaust pipe, at the two girls. “A million? You aren’t lying?” he said, narrowing his eyes and curling his lips - “You must be joking! You must be naive! You must be out of your damn mind...Why, I’ve never had an opportunity like this in my life, and I’ve never thought that such an opportunity would come to me. And why are you doing this seemingly benevolent act? It cannot be benevolent, there is always something attached to such gifts. I know that first hand, for though I am intelligent, above average if I say so myself, I am cursed with solitude and misunderstandings on the part of the public. I am like a beast, locked up in his tower... Do I not deserve this, for all the pain that I have suffered from society? It is society which has outcasted me! Those idiots, those stupid people, who stopped being my friend despite my many good qualities, despite my superiority! Look at me, look at me, and tell me you do not see a good, better man? She...she has to be wrong. I don’t understand why she would not want me to be her friend. I could help her, especially now that I have all this money...Imagine me, a millionaire? Soon it will be multi-millionaire because I will invest it and make even more money. Yes, yes...I will invest it. Why, you really don’t want me here, do you?”
The two girls looked at him with pitiful, impatient smiles, which made him all the more enraged and conflicted within his own breast. “But what is it with those smiles of pity?” he thought to himself all so suddenly. “They think I am strange too; of course they do, they said so themselves. But even Lena thinks that I am strange. Why, why am I a beast even to teenage girls? Why, I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always such a loser.”
“I wasn’t always such a loser,” he said suddenly, and tearfully, his voice strained and caught up in fluid. “I wasn’t always such a loser,” he said quietly again. “Why are you giving me this money,” he said, his face flushed with copper red, his eyes watery like the sunset.
“It’s better now,” Cee said, noticing that Lena was not going to say anything, “you just go on now and forget all about this. And remember, don’t ever contact Aleku again.”
Rod looked at Lena, but the girl did not meet his gaze, instead turning away to look at the glittering computers.
“You really want me to go?” he said faintly, his hand on the door handle. “But...but I don’t understand. Millions of pounds, for me to just leave? Why...why must I question such a thing?” he laughed and opened the door, revealing the set of stairs he had come down fifteen minutes earlier. He turned to look once again at the pair with a questioning look, before stepping out.