Chapter Thirty-three
ZAIEN
Wednesday, March 21. 01:25 PM. 125 S.A.
Neu-Techstadt, Germany.
After that call it had taken Thor a couple of hours to get everything in order, and to inquire about developments in the Sil Moore case. Nothing new had come up and that was somewhat of a relief, as it would give him time to attend to the other matter that had come up. He would have left it up to Stuart to let him know, in case something important was going on, but when he had returned to the apartment no one had opened the door. Surely Jim Stuart had gone out somewhere to do something else. After all, these were his days off. Broxburn station assured Thor that in case something happened they would be the ones to call him.
Rather than wait, he headed for Edinburgh airport, where an automatic ship was already waiting for him. Surely if he had chosen to go in a flying vehicle it would have taken longer. The trip had been quick that way.
Thor had arrived just twenty minutes ago in Neu-Techstadt, formerly known as Munich and from there his transport had crossed the skies to ZAIEN's main building.
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The cosmopolitan technological city had changed quite a bit in the last sixty-odd years, since he had become one of ZAEIN's majority shareholders when its founder, Gehirn, had fled into deep space with the only ship that had ever developed a warp engine.
Neu-Techstadt was the nerve center of technology in Germany, as it had been in the old days, when it had its former name before the Great War. The city had adopted a minimalist approach to its architecture, but combined it with an architectural style that integrated ample green spaces.
Towards one of the centers, where the main technology companies were located, a gigantic structure of a building formed by helicoidal helices stood out, with hanging gardens and artificial waterfalls mixed into its architecture. Those gardens and waterfalls sprouted from the two spiral buildings that rose into the sky. The spiral structure as a whole surrounded a gate tree, which was just glowing with a faint blueish color at that hour.
At the foot surrounding the tree were other smaller buildings. That in itself could be considered a city. There were laboratory complexes, factories, recreation areas, and hotels and a permanent residential area.
That was the main building and complex of the company ZAIEN: Zukunftsorientierte Allianz für Intelligente Energien und Neue Technologien.
The empire for technology and the study of thelesic magic that Gehirn had founded. Gehirn had kept himself hidden from the world, despite being its owner, while delegating power to publicy visible representatives. Not even the major press had been able to find out that behind the board of directors and shareholders was a survivor of a war from another era.
As Thor approached, he saw the familiar surroundings that he had visited so often over the past few decades, when he was not working at SID. The building blended harmoniously with its surroundings. Around the base, green gardens and waterfalls spread out, purifying the air and providing a relaxing environment for visitors and employees. The main entrance to the building combined a minimalist design in the black and white structure, yet harmonious with the surrounding greenery, accompanied by sculptures in the Ecogeometric style, a post-war artistic style.
Those sculptures had been placed in the surrounding area over the years. It had been part of a worldwide movement by states that had involved hundreds of artists around the world.
Because of the fractus and its abilities, cases of ikunaphobia and trypophobia had skyrocketed around the world. That had been aimed at getting people used to not being afraid of geometry and to embrace the technology that the invaders had brought with them. In a way it had worked, but it had been an effort that had taken shape when the civilization had used the huge chunks of the other earth from another dimension, floating in Earth's orbit, to create the Orbital Ring.
Thor snorted looking out the window, the vehicle was floating on the twentieth floor of the main spiral building.
Thor's transport vehicle landed on one of the leaves, that served as a port into the building, and down the small ramp that opened on the left side of the vehicle. There, waiting for him was a fey woman, her hair tied in a bun and dressed in a white suit.
"Sir. Welcome."
Thor greeted her with a slight head bow. "So. How bad is it, that I had to come personally?"
"Please, come."
Thor took one last look at the city. Just beyond, away from the ZAIEN complex, the SAIRIS megastructure loomed against the sky. The Space Asteroid & Interstellar Resource Industrial Syndicate. Curiously, its owners, the Ivraeva, had some connection to the case Mai and Shin had investigated last week, even though the Ivraeva no longer lived in Earth space, but on the Moon.
"It's a small world," Thor mused, before following his secretary.
They both headed inside, taking a magnetic elevator, almost entirely transparent, which began to descend downward.
The interior of the building was almost as solemn in design as the exterior. A central atrium rose through multiple floors, flooding the spaces with natural light, which reached all the way to the interior floors. Employees and visitors rode high-speed magnetic elevators, which moved quietly and efficiently
Each floor of the building was dedicated to a specific purpose. There were also state-of-the-art research labs, innovation rooms equipped with holographic technology for collaboration, and flexible work areas that accommodated the changing needs of staff. There were also spaces set aside for showcasing emerging technologies and advances in sustainable energy. Toward the upper floors were offices and meeting rooms.
But they didn't go that way.
The magnetic elevator left the upper floors and went subway. The green disappeared to give way to a somewhat darker place, flooded with a pale light coming from the different floors below.
After a few seconds it stopped and they both came to a floor that, while not in a dilapidated state, was not as well cared for as the other areas. It looked a little grayer with unpainted concrete walls. They walked down some long, labyrinthine corridors, until they came to a small group gathered before a large metal double door that was closed.
"Good afternoon. What exactly has happened?"
"Mr. Thor," said a man in a lab coat, hearing the voice behind him.
They greeted him respectfully and stepped aside to make room for him. In front of Thor was a reader that could only be opened with a biometric signature. The device was somewhat antiquated, but with enough parameters that it could not be opened from the outside. The equipment and tools around it spoke for themselves, that they had tried to enter the place without success.
"A few hours ago the block with external link was activated, and started sending orders that it was required your presence. This block has inserted a malicious code that has spread to the others but has not acted until now. The analysis department and the crypto department have been unsuccessful in invading and isolating it."
"Can't you just shut it down?"
"We would try but we don't know what damage it may cause to the system. The strong code has taken root in the company's blocks and quickly spread to many others in a matter of seconds."
"It can't be debugged with the self-aware programs either?"
"Not at the moment. The fifteen thousand affected blocks have detected it, but have not been able to clean it from the systems. For a total cleanup we would have to cut off all access to the network and reset all the blocks."
A bead of sweat trickled down Thor's temple. "How much are we talking about on the market?"
"We'd get it back in no time, but up and down dragged five points down today, although it's possible that if we reset it and a three-hour cleanup was done in a massive way by Friday we'd have them back."
"I don't think that's a good idea," Thor said, scratching his chin, as he did the math in his head.
Considering the interconnected citywide network system, ZAIEN held some of the communication for the entire city, not to mention the information blocks had real-time access to many devices developed by the company globally.
Chances are that if there was a scheduled outage of the main system there would have been no problem, but to do it suddenly was going to cause problems not only around the city, but also around the world. The company's systems extended globally and connected to other smaller companies. They ranged from software to hardware for different purposes. Medicine, vehicle control, ships, control programs for the monitoring and help of magicians who had no absolute control of their abilities, industrial machinery of different types from mining to agricultural production. It could be chaos if the quantum information processing blocks had to be restarted.
"What about the information processing blocks in reserve for emergency?" Thor asked.
"They have been cut off from access," said one of the technicians.
"The code itself has cut it off?! What the hell exactly is it asking for?"
The group looked at the biometric signature reader and the man in the robe who had spoken first looked at it nervously. " It's asked for you sir, expressly. It wants to have a word with you."
To the goddesses. Let them sand my ears! Thor frowned. That ancient block had been expressly built by Gehirn, but he did not know why it had remained in operation for so long. "Why has it continued to function? Aren't the blocks replaced every two years?"
"Well the current ones are better in terms of material and process, but this one was built by Gehirn and, after the investigation when he disappeared, nothing suspicious was found. In fact it has been self-maintained all these years. On the other hand it is used all the time, even though it is so old."
"What does that mean?"
"The block has connections to servers at several universities, which is why it is still running. In fact it serves as a support for students for stellar simulations, advanced calculus courses and for thesis support and hypothesis simulations. Many have graduated using this block as support for their PhD theses."
"Not to mention that the quantum data processor has always had an external connection to study centers here and in space," reported another technician.
"What does it handle on the outside?" asked Thor, turning to him.
"It monitors activity in the solar system and processes data from extrasolar research satellites. It also has a connection to the solar monitoring labs."
"The problem is that malicious code has spread to hold the other processing cores hostage."
Thor turned his gaze back to the door. "You're telling me then that it used the outside connection to bypass and override the security protocols of the other blocks?"
"We don't know what the purpose is, because it is dormant, but not executing. The heuristic capability of the block is very good, but it was never equipped with a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence support. In fact the system in place is even self-responsible. We're pretty sure no one has been down here in years."
"Isn't it possible that some code of conduct developed that could have generated the error? Or that someone hacked into the system from the outside?"
"The surveillance system hasn't detected anything. But there is something else."
"What?"
The man in the lab coat thought about it for a moment and said. "While the problem started today, the code itself started spreading last week."
"How so?"
"Well that's normal. Sometimes the block extended code to study the other blocks' models and make some model improvements. That's why we didn't find it strange."
"Isn't it possible that the problem came from something that was copied wrong from the other models?"
"It's unlikely."
"When did the problem start?"
"Friday morning."
"Nothing strange happened other than that?"
The man thought about it for a moment. "There were a number of four thousand solar system-wide DEs. Of all of them only eighty-two proved real, but nothing involving any digital aberration events or virtual worlds."
At that point the secretary interjected, raising a hand. "There was a solar system scale event, but it was not a Dark Event."
Everyone turned to look at her. "There was unusual solar activity that Friday. In fact, electrical problems occurred in several places, but nothing more serious than momentary outages."
"Solar activity, eh?" asked Thor, crossing his arms.
The secretary nodded. "In fact... if the data is correct, the code began to spread just ten minutes after that happened."
The man in the lab coat nodded as well. "Yes that's true, although that had nothing to do with our systems. Everything worked properly here. There was no failure of any system."
Thor paused to think about it. He remembered that in Edinburgh he had heard something about system errors that Friday morning, had that happened because of that too? Finally he snorted. "Well. I guess this is my responsibility anyway."
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"Sir, you're going in there?"
"Of course. What did you expect after I had to travel here? We'd better settle this quickly before it gets worse."
"But we don't know what's in there."
"It's just a processing block, not an iron-maiden. On the other hand Gehirn was very prone to jokes and riddles. Who knows if what's there might not give us a clue as to what happened when he disappeared."
The group fell silent. That possibility had crossed the minds of many others in the company over the years who knew who the real owner was. Gehirn had suffered an attack that had nearly killed him, and several others that had failed. But in the first one he had lost part of his memories. That had led him to sometimes generate mnemonic techniques regarding his personal projects, in case something similar could happen in the future. Many thought that perhaps somewhere in the company there might still be a clue to the mysterious warp drive and the plans for the ship with which he had disappeared. Many other things had been found, but nothing had ever been found about it.
"Give me a second, I'll call security just in case," his secretary told him.
"Did you try to feed the reader with my data?"
"Well we tried..." said the man in the lab coat.
"Don't tell me you tried to put some synth with my biometric data?"
"..." Silence was the only answer.
"Did you?" Thor asked again.
"We tried. But the problem is that, as much as we had your data, there was a possibility that this reader could take into account something we didn't know about. For example, the signature of the electrical signal of your ability, or a scanner to detect the external shape pattern of the Shy-Organ. That's something that can't be faked."
"I see. Well let's see how this goes."
The reader was almost level with him. After all Gehirn also had a body that appeared to be that of a child of about ten, despite being an old man of over 200 years at the time of his escape.
Thor put his hand on the scanner and from the sides of the reader sprouted thin wires that attached themselves to his hand, others touched his face and others went under the collar of his shirt. Indeed, the technicians and scientists had been right. That reader was taking into account other patterns besides the biological ones.
The sensor wires were removed and returned to the sides of the reader, while a green light came on. Almost twenty seconds later they could hear a series of gears. The sliding metal doors were beginning to open. Inside, no light could be seen. Darkness was the only answer.
Thor took three steps, stepping through the doors at least forty centimeters thick.
"Please wait," his secretary alerted him. But he was already inside.
Those outside heard a sound on the floor, almost flush with the door, and about half a second later a part of the floor another forty centimeters thick disappeared. Everyone turned away just as a new metal wall rose up from the floor concealing the place where Thor had entered.
He heard the alarmed voices of the scientists and his secretary, but the sound was soon drowned out and nothing more could be heard. He was trapped.
He heard the sound of the double door closing, but it was too late. It had closed completely.
It was complete darkness.
Until he began to hear something else. It was the sound of something moving inside. It was the sound as if the whole structure was changing. Almost instantly a dim light began to grow. It was not the illumination of large spotlights. That light was produced by small electric blue dots of light in the room, they were on the walls. The dots twinkled like stars in the sky, or followed straight paths in different directions. Like shooting stars, but with geometrically precise traces on a circuit board.
Seeing himself standing there gave him the sensation that he was floating in the middle of space.
The entire room must have been at least thirty meters long by another thirty meters wide and high. The sound of movement was indeed coming from the walls of the room, which seemed to be made up of panels. Those panels were the ones that made up the processing block.
Upon entering something must have been activated. It was undoubtedly a nice show, but it would have been better if he had not cut it off from communication with the outside. Now his Neurowire had no signal at all. He was completely cut off.
Thor rolled up the cuff of his shirt and clenched his fist, almost instantly opening his eyes in surprise. "But what is this?" he wondered. "Eh? Why isn't my ability working?"
His question was answered only by a light that grew a little brighter in the room. In front of him appeared a figure he had not seen in a long time. It was a projected hologram.
"How's it going? It's been a long time."
"Gehirn?! What the hell is this?"
In front of him stood that immortal boy, who had raised so many legends around him, even if they were nothing more than whispered secrets. White hair, blue eyes. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. For such a powerful man Gehirn had not appeared so in his last years before disappearing. He had always been a man in a boy's body, who had dressed with etiquette and good taste. But in the years before he disappeared he had a more relaxed appearance for some reason.
Thor approached the hologram and passed his hand over. "Is this a live feed? Where are you?"
The Gehirn hologram gave him a pointy-toothed smile. "I'm sorry, but no. This is not a live broadcast. This is a holographic simulation for speech only and it's not a very detailed one either. It has simply copied my behavior patterns, but it is programmed for this conversation only."
"What the hell happened to you? Why did you disappear?"
"I can't tell you that, I'm sorry," Gehirn said, with a melancholy smile.
Thor frowned. "Why can't I use my ability here?"
Gehirn smiled again. The hologram walked across the room, flashing a smile that at that moment seemed to Thor to be that of a shark.
"Tell me Thor. You knew about Varen? one of the study centers that took it upon themselves to study your ability and study the pattern of it, didn't you?"
"Of course I know that! Without that I could not have acclimated properly. I would be ball lightning if it wasn't for the training program I went through to control my electrical pattern."
"Then I suppose by now you must also know that Varen is part of ZAIEN."
Thor looked at him suspiciously. He had known that even before. Varen was one of the many study centers for feys who were newcomers to help them adjust to society. "I know that too. What does that have to do with it?"
"I've known your ability for a long time. What I never told you is, it can also be nullified, at least momentarily at least."
"What have you done?"
"Oh! Don't worry. Once you leave this room everything will be back to normal. I just didn't want you blowing up this block. It took me a long time to build it."
"What have you done?" Thor repeated.
"Don't get mad. They're just special nanobots that discharge the residual electricity that's not part of your biological body's electrical signal, but part of your fey core, they Shy Organ. Right now they're sending that power to this whole room." The hologram pointed around. "Those are the pretty lights in the room. They're getting electricity from your core."
"What do you mean?"
"All of your ability is currently conducting through the microchannel circuits of the entire room. The sensors at the entrance were inserted into you, but they function here only."
"Have you created a way to block the fey abilities?"
Gehirn put a finger to his lips. "You don't want someone out there to find out about this. Some would find the news juicy and who knows what they might do if it gets out that there is a way to nullify the fey's abilities."
"You bastard! Why did you do something like that?"
"Simply for this talk. I know that despite that facade of serenity, you have a horrible temper at times. But they'll fade once you get out of here."
"And then what?"
"You crap them out. That's it."
A bead of sweat trickled down Thor's face. "What about your code? It can cause a disaster out there."
"The moment you walked in here the code started self-devouring itself. It's a one-time use cyclic virus. A cracker's trick from the olden days."
"Are you telling me that out there everything is returning to normal?"
Gehirn nodded.
Thor arched an eyebrow. "All this to bring me here? What do you want now. After all these years?"
"I want to talk to you about something."
"If you planned this, how did you know I was coming? What would have happened if I was already dead? As you know, I don't specifically have the most peaceful job."
Gehirn smiled at that. "I was counting on you surviving."
"On the other hand, I'm sure security personnel are arriving right now to force the door."
Gehirn's hologram looked away, as if thinking about something. "Ah, if it's about that, don't worry. As you know, the attacks by those fanatical terrorists who worshipped fractus as saviors put a damper on plans to build entire megalopolises, with buildings consisting solely of force fields."
Thor knew that. The force field technology was not developed for war purposes only, but the idea was to serve to materialize entire building complexes. All went well for a few years, until the evil genius had found a new way to generate terror in society with something that should have been another proof that civilization was moving forward.
Groups of terrorists attacked the power complexes, which the force fields used to generate buildings
When shut down, or destroyed, they had resulted in the fading of entire buildings and as a consequence the people in those buildings had succumbed to the force of Earth's gravity, or died within seconds in the case of Mars and the Moon. Those attacks had claimed at least thirteen million dead around the world, and hundreds of thousands more in extraplanetary space in the first decades of the Singularity Era.
"What does this have to do with anything?" Thor asked.
"Well, in case they try to enter the room by some other means, for example using an atomic vivration hammer, they're going to run into a problem."
"Don't tell me that…"
Gehirn smiled. "There's a specially composed layer of force field surrounding the entire complex. I don't think they're going to find the generator, and even if they do I doubt they'll touch it, considering the whole structure could collapse by creating a material void when it shuts down."
"Are you thinking of demolishing the entire complex? What the hell is on your mind?!"
"Don't worry, it's just this part. The structure of this part is separate, so there is no problem. The outsiders don't know that though or, at least, I hope not yet."
Thor looked at him and sighed. Even if it was a hologram it gave him the same feeling as if he had seen it in person. Somewhat sly, egotistical, and always with an ace up his sleeve.
No one who knew Gehirn's history was surprised by his decision to disappear on the other hand.
On the one hand Gehirn had given all his resources to the war and, after the war, had even become more powerful. Without his money the Nevermore project would also never have yielded the results it had. Almost, in a way, it could be said that much of the acceptance of the feys by human and aeon society had been due to the political and diplomatic machinations and economic measures it had generated over the decades, since the First Cold War on the Ancient Era.
It had been a breeding ground not with an immediate purpose, but with calculated objectives for the future.
But, on the other hand, the persecution to which ZAIEN was subjected when the news that the first warp engine had been generated changed things a lot, although people never found out what really happened. In the face of the public opinion, and with dirty campaigns, the company was amended to reveal the advances for the benefit of all mankind.
In just a couple of days everything exploded. The council told the press that no such breakthrough had been achieved in a hyperdrive. And so did many other authorities on the subject. India, Brazil and Argentina had made some progress, but the projects were not out of the planning phase yet.
A secret investigation was opened in order to clarify everything. But it came too late.
The personnel involved in the construction, a trusted special crew, Gehirn himself, and some of his close associates, all disappeared. No one ever saw the ship, and the shipyard on one of Saturn's moons, where the construction had taken place, was destroyed before authorities, composed of Council and Space Security Council forces, arrived on the scene.
The ship with the first warp drive in history had vanished into the eternal night of the cosmos, and there was no clue as to where it might have gone.
But, despite all this, Gehirn's true identity never came to light and, with the ship gone and no evidence, there was nothing to confirm the story. That in a way had been both a good and a bad thing.
On the one hand, with Gehirn gone, there was no way for others to know that he had been behind the scenes of many of the historical events. That would have implied a certain complicity of the Council, space authorities and the United Nations. In public opinion, this would have generated enough unrest in society for the discontent to reach the governmental levels and for the Aeons to take action. Being designated as entities with political authority, they would pay more attention to people's complaints than societies such as the Council or the United Nations. Such organizations, from their point of view as a hive mind, could always be restructured and many did not want that.
But, on the downside, the achievement of warp drive technology would have boosted the space race in an unimaginable way.
There was one fact that was ignored in the story, though. That fact was that Thor could have prevented Gehirn from escaping.
A month before he disappeared, he had shown up at his house to chat with him. That talk had surprised Thor greatly, since they were not very close to begin with and the only point that somehow united them was that they had money.
He had come to talk to her about a proposal to offer her a seat at the ZAIEN board of directors' table. He had been somewhat melancholy in talking about not weakening the structure of the company, after it had taken so many years to build it up.
In that Thor understood why. Because he knew that ZAIEN and Nevermore had become too deeply rooted in the market and in the technological development of the world. The Nevermore Institute, with its pharmaceutical branches and the SID, along with ZAIEN had been and still were fundamental pieces to the fact that people had been so accepting of the feys since the end of the war. The fall would no longer affect only the feys, the entire civilization could succumb in a way. Although new companies with similar power had arisen, both had a nexus of union in society that could not be denied.
Thor, on the other hand, did not know what to do with his money. He liked gambling, but as a form of play, nothing more, he was not greedy. He found no personal use for it and almost always donated a good part of what he got anyway.
And so it had happened, Thor had bought shares in Gehirn's company only a few weeks before the disappearance. He was shocked to learn what was going on behind closed doors. In the press, news of the warp drive cooled quickly after Gehirn's disappearance and the story was dismissed as an attempt by a rival company to make general market moves.
An internal investigation had begun, in order to find out more details, and it was found that Gehirn had developed cloning programs and experiments that were forbidden by the new post-war laws.
Despite all this, technically Gehirn had never fired a gun. He had not killed anyone either, but his crime was not to have given up his research. After all, the man had always been the same. A researcher and inventor. His crime was his inordinate curiosity about everything.
The decision to disappear could have stopped something as promising as an engine to travel beyond the speed of light. But, considering the fights between the central powers, and the space branches, that might have been a good decision. Even Oxy was thinking along similar lines. The world was not yet ready for that.
Gehirn probably made that decision based on everything he had seen over the years. He himself liked to say that throughout history morality had wreaked more havoc than greed.
Not because morality was a bad thing. But in the sense that it could be used for a good purpose, but it could also become the weapon that destroyed a society. Morality had led to conquests, to attempts at racial cleansing based on ideas of superiority, to outrages and theft of the rights of others.
In an uncontrolled era, after the civilization of three types: human, aeon and fey, had just come out of a conflict against a species from another dimension, the danger was no longer the fractus.
The danger was the Dark Events and the new ideologies and movements that could come out of all that. The sense of morality could generate a military expansionism in the solar system, something that had happened. It could generate a war between the different corporations that had enough power to move the market of entire planets. And it could also generate ideological movements that saw the Dark Events as saviors of a civilization that did not deserve its rightful place in space.
In such an era a discovery, like the one Gehirn had made, could have fanned an even worse fire.
If it really was so, then the status quo of decades could have unleashed a war for space that who knew where it might have led. It was better to wait for civilization to finally reach the maturity and wisdom to understand the potential for progress it could have if it put some preconceived notions aside.
Thor sighed wearily, and looked at the hologram. "Is it true then?"
"The what?"
"The warp engine thing."
Gehirn smiled proudly. "Yes, it's true."
That self-confidence and smile made him angry, but it wasn't worth getting angry at a hologram. "Why did you disappear?"
"I'm sorry, but I can't answer that."
"Well? What is it you want to talk about."
"We have several hours to talk."
"I don't have much time."
"I'm very sorry that you're going to have to give up a lot of your time."
"What does that mean?"
"Come."
Somewhat away from them a set of comfortable wicker armchairs formed from the floor. The landscape of the room changed and from the walls emerged a garden projection that seemed to be from another era. A warm evening sun illuminated the scene.
"What is this?"
"A memory. Another time and place. When I was still human. Happy days, before hell emptied. Please, sit down," Gehirn invited, pointing to one of the armchairs.
A wicker table with a pitcher of orange juice appeared sprouting from the floor. Surely that room had some configuration to even have some sort of drink or even food printer. Almost as if reading Thor's thoughts, a plate of sandwiches appeared next to the pitcher of juice.
There was something else on that table. A small black rectangle.
Gehirn leaned back and settled into his armchair. For a hologram he seemed genuinely relaxed. "You could have had a life of luxury the way you earned money over the years but, instead, you joined Nevermore. A vocation of service not only to the human species, but to all of civilization. That is what made me decide that my self had made the right decision. You are a long-placist, like Mai. The end justifies the means. We have a duty to life and knowledge rather than to politics or protocol measures. Though sometimes she is too soft, I wonder if she has changed."
Thor took the jug of juice and a glass that had just materialized. "What do you mean?"
"Tell me, how is Shin?"
Thor furrowed his brow and set the pitcher down halfway through pouring the juice into the glass. How does he know about Shin if when he recorded this interface he still hadn't shown up?
Gehirn smiled enigmatically at him.
Almost at once Thor heard a noise behind him. A pillar was rising from the floor. All those things, from the armchairs to the table and pillar were nanomaterials that were surely predetermined for that. But what caught Thor's attention was what he found on top of the pillar. He frowned and set the jar on the table again and walked towards the pillar.
The pillar was a little less than a meter high and had a small box with a handle on it. It had parts of transparent material that allowed one to see inside. Thor furrowed his brow as he looked at what was inside the box.
"What the hell? What is this thing doing here?" he asked with an incredulous expression, turning around and looking at Gehirn's hologram.
Gehirn just smiled and gestured for him to sit back down.