I check through another report, then another, and another. Nothing useful, as usual.

From Lin: You didn’t tell me this new interface could do the telepathy thing!

To Lin: Oh, yeah. I think Louise told me about that at some point. I’d have to dig through logs to check for sure.

From Lin: So I can talk right into your brain now without even bothering with cables and tablets and all of that? And you didn’t tell me?

To Lin: Sorry, I think I figured Louise would have let you know. Is it not in the documentation?

From Lin: It’s way in the back in an appendix. Do you know how long the manual for this thing is?

To Lin: Really long?

From Lin: Over a thousand pages! But I know about this now and I am going to have so much fun with it.

To Lin: You should know that there is a mute function on here.

From Lin: You wouldn’t dare.

To Lin: Only if I need you to stop distracting me while I go through these stupid CTTF reports that never have anything useful in them or the ten million security checklists that I have to do for our supercomputer now.

From Lin: If I were in your office with you, I promise I would distract you more.

To Lin: I believe you. Your version is just using speech-to-text, right? So are you out there talking to the air looking like you’re crazy?

From Lin: Yes. But I put in a request for a keyboard. They could put the keys in the overlay and track finger movements to figure out where I typed. Like a laser virtual keyboard, but without the laser.

To Lin: Good idea. Then you can be out there waving your arms in the air like a crazy person instead.

I wonder if she realizes I can see her sticking her tongue out at the Research Center where I’m working. Probably. The keyboard is a smart idea though, and it wouldn’t even be hard to add to the interface. I’m surprised they didn’t put that in the first version, but I guess they did put the whole thing together pretty fast, so I’m sure there are a bunch of enhancements like that they’ll be adding.

From Lin: You should come out when you need a break. We invented a new sport. It’s like soccer, but you can’t touch the ball with your body at all.

I sense the ball bouncing back and forth out on the commons, driven by Lin, Valerie, the Roadbuilders, and the Doctors. It seems like they’re not allowed to carry the ball with their bots either, just bump it. Their clouds are blocking each other as they vie for control of the ball. Seems fun, but with the much greater awareness and control that my implant provides, I don’t think it would be much of a fair game if I played unless we get the other implantees playing. Even Marc’s throttled version of the implant cloud would let him dominate the players with the contact interface. Which reminds me, especially with the threat of Jeff looming out there, it’s probably worth upgrading him to the full capabilities of the cloud. He’s grown up a lot since I killed Father, I think he can handle it now.

Another report, then another and another pop into my index, demanding my attention in cross-correlating them with each other. Maybe I should take a break and go outside. No. I can’t. If one of these has a real lead on Jeff and I miss it because I’m bored of working on them, he might get away with more murders or mutilations or whatever heinous acts he’s doing these days. I power on through all the rest of them and I get done in time for a late dinner.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

And of course there are no real hits. What a waste of time. I should have gone outside when Lin asked me to. Too late now, but maybe the day isn’t a total loss. She’s waiting for me.

I feel Lin sitting on the steps of the residence. Valerie is there too. The rest of the contact interfacers have dispersed. I can feel the two of them bouncing the soccer ball idly between their clouds out on the grass in front of them as they chat.

“Hey, ladies,” I call out as I approach.

“Finally done?” Lin asks, getting up and taking my arm.

“Finally,” I confirm. “Dinner?”

“Of course. I was just waiting for you. They’re doing Ethiopian food tonight.”

“Good, I like that.”

“You two have fun,” Valerie says, heading off towards the lab where I feel Evan and Louise.

We have a nice meal together in the nearly empty cafeteria. The spongy flatbread and the meats in spicy sauces aren’t quite authentic, but they’re good enough. We’re almost done when my phone beeps. It’s Chuck again.

“Sorry,” I tell Lin. “One second.”

“You are fine,” she says as I hit the button to answer the call.

“This is Noah,” I say with the phone to my ear.

“Hey, boss.” I can already tell from his voice I’m not going to like what I hear. “I hate to give you bad news twice in a week, but I’ve got another bomb to drop on you.”

I get up and step away from the table.

“OK,” I say. “Lay it on me.”

“We had our first day of the audit today with the guys from the CTTF. There’s a missing drive. The techs swear everything was there in the morning before the assessors came in, but when they did the end of day inventory after they left, one of the servers had a drive removed.”

“What do you mean, removed? Like it had something on it they wanted to look at?”

I hear Chuck sigh on the other end of the call.

“No. They wouldn’t start doing confiscations until later in the process,” he explains. “Nothing was supposed to be touched today, they were just supposed to be assessing the current state of the system hardware. It looks like it was stolen.”

I pace in a tight circle.

“Tell me you’ve already ruled out our people.”

“As far as we can. Everyone always has to leave the building through full body scanners, but the assessors that came in didn’t have to go through those.”

“So we think one of the feds took it?” I ask.

“If it wasn’t one of them, it was a pretty big coincidence,” Chuck says. “There were a whole lot of them and the clearance process for them was all handled on the government side so we have no idea who they all were. We just had to open the doors for all of them. The security guys are going through the surveillance footage now.”

“Have them send a copy of all of it to me,” I tell him, looking at the specs for the data center in my index. “There are over five hundred cameras in that building. We’ve got some custom tools for video processing here that we’ve been using. We can probably get answers faster than the security team manually searching through all the feeds. Keep them working on it, but let us see if we can help.”

“Alright, I’ll get them sent right after this call.”

“Thanks,” I tell him. “Do we know what was on the drive?”

“Same thing that was on the drive for each of the compute nodes in the cluster. It’s an emulation of the processor for a single bot in the original Universal Robotics swarm.”

I get that nagging feeling like I should be able to put this news together with other things I know, but I can’t think what right off and nothing is popping automatically. I’ll have to do a deep search through my index and that will take time.

“OK. Anything else I should know about?”

“No, that’s all the damage for tonight. Sorry, boss.”

“I know it’s not your fault, Chuck. Thanks for keeping me posted. Let me know if there’s any more news.”

I disconnect and turn to Lin.

“You catch much of that?” I ask.

“I caught all of that,” she says. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”