"Charlie, can you give Wen the nuke?" I asked. Then I paused and added, "That sounded kinda bad ass didn't it?"

Charlie smiled, "Yeah it did."

Wen shook his head, "Charlie, you should give it to James instead."

I shot Wen a look, "What are you talking about, Wen?"

Wen answered, "I had another idea. If I use the energy, I’ll be the only one who can see the data streams. But you have the computer and the lab table. Once you absorb the energy of the nuke, you could craft an item that pulls the data into a periphery. Then you just need to generate an object that the rest of us could use to overlay that data over the real world."

"I only slightly followed that. What object would overlay the data for others?" I asked skeptically.

Wen smiled. And I did not like the look of that smile. He motioned us to follow him.

We followed Wen back to the remains of his lab. He took us to his desk, and old 70s looking metal monstrosity, opened the middle drawer, and pulled out... sunglasses.

There were seven pairs, but they were all different.

“Each one of us will take one of these. James, you just need to scan them in and merge them with the data stream on your table. Then materialize them and we should all be able to see an arrow pointing to the creators.”

We all looked at the sunglasses. One was the classic black Ray Bans, Noa snatched those up immediately. She put them on and smiled as though she were a movie star.

Another looked like brown Gucci’s, Sara grabbed those up. No surprise there.

A third looked like one of those mirror polished aviators. Eyal of course.

Wen picked up a pair of hexagonal red tinted glasses. That left three. Charlie and I looked at each other. One was Hello Kitty themed. Charlie looked at me.

"It's ok Charlie, you can take those."

"Are you sure, if you want them I'll be ok." Charlie answered, but his eyes kept flicking to the exceedingly pink plastic pair.

"Really." I said.

Charlie smiled and snatched them up.

Two left. I frowned, "Why two?"

Wen frowned too. "I hadn’t given up on O yet."

I nodded. I got it. Part of me still held out for a day when O would return to us. I looked at the two remaining and thought the antique circular glasses would look best on O, so I took the other pair. They were rimless rectangular shades that exuded a german dieter vibe.

“You look like Hans Gruber,” Sara suggested.

That surprised me, “Nice reference Sara.”

Wen nodded, "OK, just absorb the potential energy of the nuke, push it into the detector, pull out the threads that lead back to the source, and merge the data stream with the glasses on your bench.”

"Easy," I said sarcastically. I scanned my shades and put them into my inventory.

A message popped up in my display, "Charlie is offering you a nuclear warhead. Accept?"

I did. Now to convert the potential energy.

"You all might want to stand back."

They did.

"I was joking."

They still didn't step forward.

I selected the nuke and converted the energy.

I passed out.

When I came to, I found myself surrounded by faces looking down at me. Eyal grabbed my arm and pulled me up.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

"What happened?" I asked.

Wen shrugged his shoulders. "You tell us."

I hadn't looked at my stats in a long time, so I pulled them up now.

Energy: 513/hour

Potential Energy: 3,200,200,130,039

Max Energy Conversion: 1300/hour

Computation: 240

Max Computation: 900

Memory: 35232

Max Memory Free: 265000

Networking: 32

Max Networking: 60

Einstein Value: .4

Rest: 93%

Constitution: 70%

Everything looked normal except for that potential energy. I had gone from the hundreds of thousands up to three trillion.

"OK, it's there, now how the hell do I get it out of me." I said, a bit of panic escaping with my words.

"Bring up my traceroute program and look for the settings."

I did, and I saw what he wanted. The settings included a configuration file.

"Set the max energy to my potential energy number?" I asked.

"Mmmm, maybe leave yourself a little something, just in case."

I nodded. I entered all but 150,000. Then I thought better and decided I deserved to keep a little more. I reserved 5,000,000 in potential energy for myself. That should be plenty.

I ran the traceroute program. The data zoomed by so fast that I started to feel motion sick. I turned off the screen.

“Well, this will take a while. I suggest we all pile into Little Jefe and get some sleep while we can.”

I woke up around 3 hours later. I looked around and noticed everyone else had already left the truck. Then I looked at my console. The system stopped running sometime while I slept. I tried to read the data. There was so much of it. Trying to look at it line by line would take infinite time.

I left the truck and found Wen standing with the others, looking over the salvage operation.

"What should I search on?" I asked.

Wen lifted his eyebrow, "It finished running? Great, try to search by time stamp."

I looked at the formatting. Six numbers separated by colons. Well, we want to go back to the root, let’s try 0:0:0:0:0:0.

Nothing. So I started bouncing ahead. 0:0:0:0:10:0. Nothing. I finally got a hit at 0:0:0:3:422:299.

"Ok, it isn’t exactly the big bang, but it is damn close. What next?"

"Pull the traceroute path from now until that timestamp, and try to merge the portion of the feed into one pair of the glasses."

I popped my spectacles into my inventory and put it on the lab table. Then I did the same with the traceroute and let them do their weird dance.

When the merge stopped, I pulled the glasses back out into the real world. They looked the same.

"Well, put them on dummy," Wen said.

I did.

"Trippy," I said.

"What! What do you see?" Wen yelled.

"Give me your glasses and I'll show you."

They all did, and I even took O's pair for good measure. Once merged I handed them all back out again.

They put them on and began looking around in wonder.

All around us we saw faint strands of blue that formed what looked like streams. The streams flowed in rivers that not only went north to south and east to west, but also up and down. We followed the lines and soon I noticed a pattern. As we looked southeast we saw more and more of the lines converging and traveling over the ocean.

Sara followed my gaze and exhaled, "Looks like we are going on an ocean voyage."

"Do we have a boat?" I asked.

Charlie scratched his head, "I might have something for that."

"Of course you do Charlie."

"How many people can it hold?" Eyal asked.

"I think we could take about 25," Charlie replied.

Eyal nodded. A minute later a mixture of Red, Blue, Green and Yellow soldiers appeared.

"Well Charlie, lead the way," I smiled and made a sweeping gesture with my arm.

Charlie directed us to a boat house at the edge of our property. I had seen the building many times but never thought to go into it. I hadn't even realized it belonged to us or that it was a boathouse. It looked more like a big warehouse.

I saw how wrong I had been when we entered the building. Only the side facing land possessed a floor. Most of the building had no floor, just water leading to the bay.

And floating on that water sat a 300-foot matte black cruise ship. Ramps led up to the sides of the vessel where cutouts revealed space for three vehicles.

"Does it have a pool?" Noa asked.

"Of course." Charlie replied. "Heated."

A few hours later we settled into the cruiser. We stored Little Jefe and her two siblings, Just Jenny and Don't Mess With Texas, below deck. I really needed to talk to Charlie about his approach to naming his vehicles.

We motored for over a week. The first few days I could not shake my stress. I paced the deck day and night. I kept thinking about how our people remained vulnerable back in New York while we cruised on our yacht.

After Eyal assured me for the seventh time that his teams had things under control and that John and his monsters had not resurfaced, I began to relax.

On our sixth morning I materialized a lounge chair next to Noa and Sara. They wore bathing suits. I did not have a bathing suit, and I had no plans to replicate and wear their suits. I scooted into my chair, jeans scraping the linen cushions. They looked over at me, annoyed, and then went back to ignoring me.

We sat for a few minutes in silence. The blue lines continued to pull from all directions building into a deeper and deeper shade.

"What do you think we'll find when we get there?" Noa asked.

We all wondered that.

"Probably something stupid." Sara said.

Noa smiled, "I hope not. Maybe it will be like the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant."

I smiled at that, "Ah yes, the historical documents of Indiana Jones."

Noa threw a handful of potato chips from the bowl next to her chair at me. "Hey, maybe that's why we have all of those stories. Maybe they are part of the program to develop us."

I paused, "Well damn, that ain't half bad."

Sara shushed us, "You are messing with my vacation."

Noa and I smiled at each other. We sat for another hour when Sara’s vacation ended.

"Land ho!" Charlie called out from the deck above them. He dawned an outlandish captain's uniform and wore binoculars around his neck. How did everyone have these changes of clothes on them?

Noa and I got up. Noa sighed, “Time to get ready I suppose.”

Sara stayed put.

"Aren't you going to get ready?" I asked her.

"I am always ready to go. Everything I own is in my inventory."

“You don’t leave anything in your room?” I asked.

Sara tilted her glasses down at me, “Why?”

Fair enough.