“So it looks like Jeff is back together with the CPP? And he has a working cloud for sure?” Evan asks.
“Those are the only explanations we can come up with,” I answer. “The woman that we spotted him with at the brain-in-a-box facility doesn’t have any identity at all. No drivers license in the country matches her picture, no pictures of her anywhere on the internet either, and Lin’s got a whole supercluster in the basement now that chugs on that kind of thing. If she had an identity that hadn’t been totally scrubbed, we’d know about it by now. So, we figure this is the CPP’s signature disappearing magic. Meaning, Jeff is working with them again. And yes, he for sure used nanobots to grab the drive. The rack was in a camera deadzone so we don’t have footage of the thing floating, but he and his partner in crime were like twelve feet away when they grabbed it.”
“Right.” Evan chews his lip for a minute. “Why would he go back to them after slipping away once? What would he need them for?”
“Resources, probably,” Louise says. “Those deep, deep pockets of theirs were probably handy for letting Jeff get his cloud fixed up and maybe even upgraded, not to mention whatever he has in mind next. We know what they want from him, some kind of limited disaster to get nanotech shut down forever. But Jeff wouldn’t go along with that knowingly. He was afraid of the AI takeover, but deep down he always believed in Father’s vision for using the bots to save the world as much as any of us. I wish we knew what he thought they were after.”
“What if we checked the Wallace Hospital where he was held before they absconded with him?” Lin suggests. “Surely there must have been some correspondence between him and our nebulous adversaries before the event? Perhaps that might contain a clue to what he thought their arrangement entailed.”
“That was one of the first places we checked when we were first looking for him,” Evan answers. “They kept all of his mail and turned it over to us. We didn’t find anything useful. Mostly all he got was weird fan mail from some really fringe crazies. We even checked it all for secret codes and everything, but there was nothing suspicious at all.”
“Did we ever get the notes from his therapists there?” Louise asks. “I remember we had the lawyers working on that when the whole Denver thing happened.”
“Never did,” Evan says. “There wasn’t a legal way to do it because of medical privacy laws and it didn’t seem as relevant after he popped up. Then we had a lot going on and it just kind of fell off of my radar.”
“Hah! Should have put it in Noah’s brain. He doesn’t forget stuff anymore.”
“We can’t all be as special as me.”
“Of course not, Noah. You are a very special boy.” She reaches over and pats my head condescendingly. I pull back as Lin laughs. “But couldn’t you use your special skills to just break in electronically and steal the records that way? That shouldn’t be that hard, right? Aren’t you and Lin some kind of hacker team now?”
“It would be nice if it were that easy, which is why Lin and I tried that already. No good. It looks like they keep them on old fashioned pen and paper locked up somewhere on site.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“So, you’re volunteering for a field trip then?” Louise asks.
“I can go. As long as the rest of you stay here to hold down the fort, I don’t think it’s a problem if I’m gone for a day or two. I won’t be able to take the jet without breaking our grounding, but it’s not too far to drive. I can keep a low profile and scan the files from way outside the hospital. What the CTTF doesn’t know won’t hurt them.”
“Take some backup,” Evan says. “At the very least you’ll want a lookout.”
“I’m my own lookout,” I protest. “I can see everything for kilometers in every direction.”
“We know what you can do. But even you have limits on your attention,” Louise says. “If you’re chained out to reach a room far from your body and focusing on copying documents, you might miss someone coming up on you. And what if the CPP or Jeff are having someone keep an eye on the place? Plus, I don’t want a repeat of what you did to yourself in St. Louis. I know you needed to, but you know how damaging it is to your brain. Evan told me about how you’ve been deteriorating again. I still don’t want you pushing yourself.”
“Dammit, Evan,” I say with more irritation in my voice than I intended. Having my own culpability for my disability pointed out, even by my most trusted sibs, hurts more than I like to admit.
“What?” he says defensively. “She was just across the room in the lab when you told me you were getting worse. I assumed it wasn’t a secret.”
Fair enough. I know when I’m beaten. “Fine. I’ll bring backup.” I don’t mind that they’re right, I just hate it when I’m wrong.
“Take Lin,” Evan says. “She can watch your back and you two can have a nice little road trip. You don’t mind, do you Lin?”
“Of course not. It will be a pleasant outing for the two of us.”
“We’ll call it date night for the week.” I give her my most charming smile.
“How special! We so seldom go on proper dates.”
“Yeah, nothing like breaking into a psych ward to steal patient files to bring out the romance.”
Louise rolls her eyes. “Will you two get out of here already?”
“Aw, but they’re so cute together,” Evan says. “Especially now that they’re not fighting all the time anymore.”
Fighting? Were Lin and I fighting a lot at some point?
From Evan: Oh, haha, you probably can’t remember it. Check your secret files sometime.
He must have noticed my puzzled expression. Secret files though? I don’t have any of those.
To Evan: I don’t even know what you’re talking about.
He shakes his head at me.
From Evan: And you don’t remember that you have secret files. Of course you don’t. Because we erased out the part where we set up your secret files.
I just give him another quizzical look and he shrugs.
From Evan: Not important today, but we should talk about it later. Does Lin still connect right up to your brain these days?
To Evan: Not much lately. Not since she finished reading my whole memory and got the telepathy thing working through her interface.
“Something you boys want to share with the group?” Louise asks. “Or can Lin and Noah get going? If they leave now they can get there and back today. And Evan, Max, and I have some real work to do. We still need to figure out Father’s notes on the implant upgrade so we can finally get the Geologists up to where we are. I have a feeling we’re going to need them at full power sooner than later.”
“Then we shall depart henceforth. Hopefully returning with useful and relevant data to continue our efforts.” Lin grabs my hand and practically lifts me out of my chair with a combination of her pulling on one side and her bots pushing me from the other. She’s gotten good with her cloud quickly. Maybe all that botball practice is paying off.