Episode 36
Considering how Sharp had planned on spending his weekend—hunched over his keyboard while conducting field tests with AI bots for his upcoming product launch until twenty minutes before he had to be at work—sweeping up dead bugs and mopping up soggy floor tiles covered in formerly flying leeches wasn’t upsetting him as much as he thought it would. The work wasn’t challenging, just mundane and repetitive, but made light due to the conversation he had with Cattleya. Once the floor looked presentable, he moved to the back of the room.
He had already moved all the unburnt debris from the hurricane into a tidy pile of kindling and tinder over to the left corner of the lab under the observation window. Wet logs were set against the wall to dry, and the charcoaled remains were swept into a peaceful forest several portals ago. While he stacked wood under that observation window within eyeshot of the crypto mining rig location, he thought about things he could do to make whomever had tried to kill him nervous. With the network still down, this was a perfect time to rattle them.
Cattleya would gab amiably about her family and living situation, but whenever Sharp announced the timer had crossed 20 minutes, they both worked in silence as they prepared for the next shift. The gateway had changed several times, all serene, perfect as pictures, but there was always a worry that the next vista would be deadlier than they could handle.
Hours passed, and although a beautiful minotaur princess pitching in was probably a highlight for anybody’s day, especially Syd and Julian who would watch while eating popcorn, Sharp had time for his unpleasant thoughts.
How can we block the gateway? This is our number one priority, but none of the branches were large enough for the job. I lost our bathroom door hours ago. I guess that means I need two doors now. And the random windows are getting on my nerves. We’ve had them as short as five minutes and as long as forty-five. Is five minutes the minimum? Why are they so random? Unless something is lying right at the gateway for me to grab, I can’t take the risk to go out exploring.
Sharp looked around the lab. His working assumption for the moment was that somebody had deliberately fired up the wormhole generator and locked him in the WMD room because he had found the mining rig. Calling them out with snarky comments didn’t seem revengeful enough for his mood.
Instead, he decided to lift up the floor tiling over by the wormhole generator and mop underneath one cell at a time as he moved his way across the room. Since the muck had proven to be toxic, any water left behind by the storm was likely unhealthy for them as well. He lifted the ten pound floor tiles with a crowbar, peeked underneath, inspecting for water, then placed them back. Aside from minor drips from his mopping earlier, there wasn’t much water to worry about this far away from the portal. He knew that before he started, but he wanted whomever was watching him to sweat. He wanted them to mess up as he got closer and closer to that rig. He wanted them to further implicate themselves stupidly so that he could bury them in court.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
However, after lifting up tiles from the generator to the wormbox, leaving many of the room’s floor tiles upended while airing out, nobody so much as talked to him from the observation room.
Maybe I’m wasting my time. They can’t do anything to me in here until I get the network up and running again anyway.
“Tired?” Cattleya asked him since he was paused in his work.
“No, just thinking about priorities. The storm water stinks, so we need to clean this place out so it doesn’t smell like a swamp, but there are other things I should be doing, too. This little project of mine is taking too much time.”
“There are a great deal of these floor squares.”
“Tell me about it. And they’re heavy, too.” Sharp gave his AR data feeds a glance, then turned to observe his spatial notes at the portal.
“Care to help me wrap this up quickly? Let’s just air out the floor tiles that we know were soaking wet from the storm. We need to figure out some kind of door to prevent this morning’s festivities from happening again. And I need to get working on the network.”
“Network?”
“Our thinking machines are connected with wires, like that fat cable over there, when they need large amounts of data to securely travel over a distance. Wireless communication is not as stable. But, uh, some people are making progress with that issue.” Sharp glanced over his quantum signal strength, then commanded, “Prepare a report on this process.”
Cattleya scrambled to find her AR goggles, but Sharp interrupted her.
“I’m not broadcasting my virtua screens anymore. There’s nothing to see.”
“Broadcasting…” Cattleya mouthed the word slowly, her lips parted to reveal her sharp canines as her pink tongue pronounced ‘ting’. Sharp quickly looked away.
“Um, right,” he said while breathing out slowly. “Broad, cast, ing… It’s a way of sending out a message to be received by, uh, another machine.” Sharp looked back up to see that her mouth was closed, but now her large, teal eyes were opened wide and her refined eyebrows were lifted expectantly.
Are her eyes teal and purple? Stop! Don’t stare!
He cleared his throat. “We need to make time for our chat, don’t we? There’s a lot to catch you up on. I mean, you’re going to be with us until we figure out this portal mess. Let’s get a move on.”
Receiving her nod of approval, the two of them quickly proceeded to lift up the remaining floor tiles in a wide circumference around the portal. The mining rig was safe for now, but Sharp was no closer to learning who locked him in here.