“How are the upgrades going?”
“Surprisingly well,” Louise says after she finishes chewing her toast. “The new procedures Max came up with are a pretty dramatic improvement. We’re all done with the calibration work, and I think the whole Geologist crew will be fully functional in a couple of weeks.”
“And Marc?”
“Struggling, like we knew he would. He’s getting better though.”
I finish my omelet and start on my yogurt.
“Does he still talk about becoming a superhero?” Evan asks. “His old Scarlet Avenger or whatever he used to say he was going to be once he got upgraded?”
“Give him more credit,” Louse says. “He’s really grown up a lot.”
“I know. I just worry a little about him.”
“He’ll be fine. Have either of you seen the training schedule he put together for all the younger kids with the contact interface?”
“Not really,” I say. “I’ve felt them out in the desert doing something, but I’ve been pretty booked with the Jeff search.”
“It’s impressive. Between the bot sports and the mock battles, I think they’ll be ready to help out with whatever we need them for.”
“Nice.”
“Any progress on that search, Noah?”
“We’re down to three cities that still seem like possibilities. Alan has a small army of private detectives combing through them.”
“We could always just slip away and visit them,” she says.
“If we do, we risk getting shut down by the Feds,” Evan answers. “Between the robbery here and the breach of the swarm brain facility, we’re going to be on thin ice for a while. Better to play by the rules, let them find him for us, then come in and save the day when they call us in.”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Honestly, if the CTTF bosses didn’t all love Father and Chad so much, we’d probably be shut down already.”
Louise nods, chews, and swallows. “Well, the kids could still use some training, so I guess we just focus on that now. Or whatever.”
“Feeling lost without a super secret project to fill your days?” I laugh.
“Who says I don’t have another one in the works? Maybe it’s so secret that you just don’t know about it.”
From Lin: Get over to the office. You need to see this.
I put my knife and fork on my plate and get up from the table. “My boss is calling me. You know where to find me.”
“Later, brother.”
I drop off the plate on the way out and make my way to the office. Lin stands at her desk, her eyes fixed on the screen. “That’s her, right?”
“That’s who?” I run the image of the blonde woman through my facial recognition routine until I get a hit. “Oh. Yes. Jeff’s escort or bodyguard or whatever she was from the brain-in-the-box heist. That’s her. How did you find her?”
“My dating app database. I’ve been scraping profiles off of every app every day and she came in on today’s update. I guess even agents of the illuminati need to get naughty sometimes.”
“Thank goodness for the pull of the human mating instinct.”
“So where is she? One of our top cities?”
“New Orleans!”
“Then proper credit to your algorithm. You picked it!”
“And the missing persons reports from this morning confirm what we’ve suspected. Ten more went missing today from within the target demographics. Way above normal.”
“Brilliant!”
“So we depart forthwith then, right?”
“I swear I just had this conversation with Louise and Even down in the cafeteria. We can’t go. Not until the Feds call us in.”
She shakes her head. “The world is in danger and your biggest concern is following your government’s silly rules?”
“We need to take the long view. Jeff is a danger, yes, but once we deal with him we still need to stop climate change, poverty, hunger, scarcity, and all the rest of the world’s problems. If we go now, even if we succeed we’ll get locked down hard by the government and the CPP’s agenda will have been accomplished anyway. We’d be pushed back years if not decades. We don’t have any reason to think that waiting until the CTTF calls us in will be any worse than going in alone. It might even be better. We’d have their support and massive resources backing us.”
“Oh, fine. But you have to at least show them what we found.”
“Of course. I’ll get word to Maria and the General right now. How long could they possibly take to act given this intel?”