The rooms at this place are nice, I’ll give Alan and Sheryl that. Not my style, but very nice. From the shower where I’m catching my memories up I can see out the window to the city and ocean below. I’m still getting faster at reading, up 23% from my last measurement a month ago. It makes me wonder if the implant stimulates neural remodeling even more than we thought. I’ll need to talk to Louise about it at some point.
I dry off then pull my clothes over, letting my bots tie my shoelaces and tie as my fingers work the buttons of my shirt. Once I’m all ready, there’s still plenty of time for some email. Lin left me a sweet note about an hour ago telling me how much she’s missed our video calls the last couple of days. Robert finalized the details on the contract with Antonio Campos yesterday and got everything signed on their end. Chuck and Marcus got the sample VR headsets and documentation and have started working on getting our software to work with them. Everything is on track back home. Grammy and Gramps are doing great and wish me luck on our trip. I pop back some quick responses thanking and acknowledging, then spend the rest of the free time I have writing back to Lin.
And now it’s time to prove to the world again that we’re worthy heirs of Tom Butler’s legacy. I head out and hit the button in the elevator for the 5th floor, where the press event will be held in the hotel’s big ballroom. Phil and Stan get in on one of the floors on the way. They’re both decked out and looking good. Phil’s got a red shirt under his suit jacket, which I don’t think I could pull off, but it looks great next to his dark skin. I straighten out Stan’s slightly crooked tie.
“You guys ready?” I ask as the elevator descends.
“I think so. We just have to stand there for this, right?” Stan asks, fidgeting with his collar.
“Yeah, you can just be another smiling Butler child this time,” I reassure him. “Evan and I are doing the talking and the show-and-tell. If you do decide to talk to any of the press, stick to the script as much as you can. Keeping the message consistent helps a lot. If anyone asks you anything that you don’t know, just point them to me.”
“Don’t worry about a thing, Noah. We got this,” Phil says in his charismatic way. Like a movie star ready to step onto set. He spouts off a few of the official lines. Stan tries too, but his delivery comes off more like an enthusiastic extra than the star of a show. At least he’s got the content right. They’ll do fine.
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Inside the ballroom, reporters are milling around as their camera and sound crews set up their gear. A few local news outlets are here, and a whole lot of international ones are represented. I think I see everyone that we wanted to come cover us and then some. Several of the sibs are already here getting interviewed. Hopefully everyone stays on message. A gaggle quickly surrounds me, and I get flooded with questions. My index has answers to everything handy and I think I come off alright.
The last of the sibs straggle in right before the official start time, Chad last of all with his girlfriends right behind him. The sweat on his forehead in spite of the building’s generous air conditioning tells me he did some physical exertion after his shower this morning. If his satisfied grin weren’t enough to make it obvious, the readings from his and his girlfriends’ vitals tell me exactly what kind of exertion it was. So much for our talk last night making a difference.
Lucie and Keeya take seats in the audience and Chad joins us up at the front of the room. I take the podium and deliver the prepared speech with Thao translating into Vietnamese next to me. It’s not super impressive until the part where I project an example of one of the filtration units right in front of everyone. It’s twice as tall as me and about a meter deep and a meter wide, with lots of very technical looking tubing and interconnects between the parts. It’s not exactly what we’ll be putting in the river, this one is a mostly empty shell made of bots with some light tricks, but it looks about right and makes the tech talk more interesting.
Evan explains a bunch of the inner workings while I rotate it and highlight the various sections, occasionally peeling back layers and constructing innards on the fly. The press are eating it up, even the hardened international reporters are elbowing and whispering to each other as they point at the model. Real-life special effects tend to have that effect on people.
The question and answer bit at the end goes smoothly. Some of the reporters seem to think it’s fun to single out my various siblings with questions, but everyone did their homework and we all sound really good. The only minor problem is when one of the radio outlets tries to get Andrea to answer something verbally and she just keeps flashing images to answer the question. He eventually realizes she’s not going to talk and just describes her answers in a way that I think will work when they air it.
We wrap up the presentation and I let the model dissolve. The reporters head out and we have a few minutes for breakfast before we need to leave to get started on the real work of this trip. Up one floor, the cafe has a slew of options at their breakfast buffet ranging from local favorites to French and American dishes. Once everyone is done eating, we load up in a couple of big vans and head to the docks with a truck following behind with the rest of the luggage.