It’s only mid-morning, but I’m already starving. It’s that smoke. Now that Gramps has his barbecue pit, he insisted on taking charge of dinner once a week. He was stoking the fire and preparing the coals early this morning while we were doing our morning exercises on the commons. The smell of the hickory and apple wood mingle with the aroma of the slowly roasting meats. With every breath, all that I can think about is dinner.
“Do you smell that?” Lin asks as she comes into the office. I stand up from the small table in the middle of the room where I’d been working on my tablet.
“How could I not?” I answer, giving her a squeeze. “It’s killing me, I can’t wait.”
“Me neither,” she says. According to my index, she’s very partial to American barbecue. “How come you never told me your grandfather knew how to cook that way before we went to visit him?”
“Broken brain,” I reply. “It’s hard for me to make connections unless I’m looking for them. I couldn’t make the jump from you liking barbecue to him having cooked it professionally for longer than I’ve been alive. It’s obvious now though. Eating his cooking is one of the earliest things I’ve been able to coax out of my weak excuse for a human memory. ” I flip through my write-ups of memories I’ve been able to recover. As I do, a new memory spontaneously triggers. I index it quickly as I tell Lin about it. “He learned it from one of his Army buddies after they got back from Vietnam. Authentic Texas style brisket was his signature dish, though he branched out and learned styles from a bunch of other regions later on.”
“I don’t think that I would know the difference, but it smells exquisite,” she says. “Anyway, I need a distraction from all the work of setting up the new data center downstairs. Would you enjoy locking the office door and engaging in a bit of fooling around?”
I look at her and have trouble resisting. Her hair is cute today. It’s a different style than the index picture, swept to one side instead of spiked forward. I snap a still and add it to the gallery of pictures of her in my head. She’s come so far from the first ones I have of her where she was completely bald. Not that she wasn’t still pretty with a bare scalp, but I like this a lot better. Her figure, once so frail and emaciated, now features well-rounded hips and breasts, but her waist has stayed slim from all the exercise that Yang Song gets her to do. And that face. If I could, I’d spend all day staring at her.
But I can’t.
“You know I absolutely want to, but we got the video footage for tracking down Jeff that we’ve been waiting for this morning. Want to help me with it? That’s probably almost as distracting, right?”
She turns and locks the door anyway.
“Five minutes,” she insists, advancing towards me. “You are due for a break and I won’t be able to focus on anything until I’ve had a proper morning interlude.”
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“Fine,” I say, with a big fake sigh.
She giggles and pulls my head down for a long, sweet kiss. The five minutes disappear in an instant. It’s funny. Normally, I can be aware of everything happening in a huge area, but when she’s touching me, I can’t seem to see anything but her.
“Alright,” she says, glancing at the clock and hopping off my lap. “Let’s find your brother.”
“Thanks, I needed that,” I say, straightening my shirt. “And thanks for helping me with Jeff. So, let me get you up to speed. We found footage of him from the gas station on the corner next to his building. He was loading up one of those big fifteen-passenger vans with all his stolen gear the morning of the attack. He was out of there a couple of hours before Smith let loose on us. I checked the freeways out of town first, and the traffic cams got him going east on the I-70. So now, I’m setting up screens to play back footage from nearly every town east of there along every possible route. I should be able to watch all of them and do character recognition on all the license plates and track down where he ended up.”
“You were planning to do all that processing using your little magic satchel?” she asks, nodding to my processing appliance on my desk.
“Well, yeah. I mean, I was going to just stream the videos on my wall of monitors and let my digitally upgraded mind take it from there.”
“You sweet, stupid boy,” she says, stepping behind me and running her fingers through my hair. “I guarantee that my character recognition code running on the new server cluster will outperform you by a factor of a thousand. You just don’t have the hardware to compete with my racks and racks of processors.”
She pulls the back of my head into her chest each time she says “racks.” I am so turned on right now. Brilliant and gorgeous. I won the lottery with Lin.
“You are so much smarter than me. I don’t know why I didn’t think to do that.”
“Because you have an implant, and nanobots, and you think that they are the answer to everything because you’re so deft at using them. But no matter how much you like your hammer, or how powerful and efficacious a hammer it is, sometimes the right tool for the job is a wrench.”
Her idiom usage has gotten so good lately, but then she throws in random words that are way too fancy. I think it’s cute. If she ever gets over that tendency, I’d swear she’d be able to sound just like a native English speaker. She takes up her position at her desk, pops open a text editor, and starts writing scripts.
“You have files all ready with the video content that you want analyzed?” she asks.
“Yeah, I started downloading them all this morning. They’re organized by source camera location on our file server in the folders written on the whiteboard there. I made best guesses on the times Jeff would pass by on every possible route, starting at his last known time and location. Then I padded the time window by an hour on either side for each. Everything should be in a standard format with location codes embedded in the video streams.”
“Good boy,” she says, eyes locking onto her screen. “If you padded each of the video captures by an hour plus or minus, then I’m going to start two processes on each file, one working forward from the middle, one working backward from the middle. I should get results even more expeditiously that way. Now, you go get us lunch while I script this up.”
Lin’s childhood, locked away sick with mostly computers for company, is really paying off. I think of myself as really good on the technical side, but she beats me hands down at programming tasks that aren’t related to our family tech. I leave her to set up our electronic manhunt and obediently go to the cafeteria to get lunches for us both. It's just rough that the barbecue isn't ready yet.