When the River Ran Dry
Page 46
She raised an eyebrow and grinned just a little at what he suggested.
“We’re not robots, Richard. My body works the same as yours, with the exception of processors and memory nodes instead of a purely organic brain structure.”
“Okay, I get all that, but you and Jonathan were…well, intimate, right?”
Maela laughed out loud and Ricky could feel his cheeks go red.
“That part works the same way as it does for any human female, Richard.” She smiled. “I can’t conceive, but I can practice just like anyone else…”
“I didn’t mean to pry, Maela, but it’s a valid question, isn’t it? Academically, I mean,” he added quickly.
“I suppose it is,” she relented, “I guess you can say every Lima unit is one of a kind, but that doesn’t make any difference when it comes to…well, you know what I mean.”
“I just wondered,” he said at last; “I wasn’t trying to…”
“It’s okay; I’d probably ask the same questions in your place.” She smiled and Ricky decided to leave it alone.
“Are we still on for next Saturday?” he asked at last.
“We’re on for every Saturday, Richard,” Maela grinned, “unless you’d like to expand a little and maybe try something in the evening?”
Ricky blushed at the obvious meaning and possibilities he hadn’t considered.
“Good idea,” he replied.
The moment passed, but the friendship between Ricky Mills and Maela Kendrick moved another step forward on a cold and pale Novum morning.
Jonathan rarely went to the Institute so early, but the work that went untouched after Maela and Ricky appeared at his door had become an intolerable log jam. The applied research floor, always darkened and glittering from the displays within each pod, came alive when his colleagues trickled in from the cold, fighting off yawns and nursing cups of coffee. They teased him for a while, wondering with mock confusion who the ‘stranger’ was inside his pod from the security video feeds, but Jonathan only smiled and nodded at the tired joke. Valery asked him to compile and send to her every file in his system related to the solemn events from the past week and he began the copy tasks knowing every second of the strange evolution would be scrutinized in focused detail.
The news of Jamison’s arrest spread out across the city in minutes, but the most useful product of the exposed scandal made Jonathan into a reluctant hero, and from his role, notoriety for the Institute. The administrators seemed to accept the late-night maneuvers he was sure would get him fired and even the Director himself heaped public praise on Jonathan’s bravery against staggering odds and the danger of crossing three of the mighty Commissioners. It would settle, but for the moment, Jonathan was content to plod through the backlogged housecleaning tasks in his system and find the way back to his work.
He didn’t notice at first, chatting with a colleague they called Cubby about a flurry of software upgrades and the interruptions it would surely bring, but a simple alert blinked out from one of his display monitors. After a moment or two, another appeared and still another until Cubby noticed and pointed silently. Jonathan saw at last and sat to find a dozen system change alerts, each pointing to icons corresponding with file maintenance tasks and it took little time to launch the alerts before their reason became clear.
“They’re migration notices,” Jonathan answered.
“What are you migrating?” Cubby asked.
“I’m not scheduled to migrate anything, and these files are huge!”
“Who do they belong to?”
“I have no idea; they’re coming in from all over the place,” Jonathan replied. “This one’s from a server at the Transport Ministry. Here’s another one from a warehouse consortium up by the northern wire, and three from a logistics server at one of the stamping plants down below. Something’s screwy here.”
“Why would they send the notices to you?”
“Because an idiot has his head up his ass,” Jonathan said with growing agitation. “I would love to know how they got my system address in the first place!”
“A misdirect.” Cubby smiled, knowing a very big mistake was blinking out at them from the monitors. “Somebody is going to get hammered for letting this come through the firewalls.”
Jonathan inspected each element closely until the stark truth held him like a vise.
“It’s not a misdirect,” he declared; “the senders are all showing outbound queries specifically to my system; they’re sending compilers and instruction commands.”
“Open one of them up!” Cubby grinned.
Jonathan selected a random instruction command, noticing at once it directed the file to each of the remaining eleven notification alerts.
“This doesn’t make any sense.” He frowned. “They’re all…”
“Jonny?”
“Each command line points my control program to a bunch of storage servers; they’re split off from a single source, but I can’t find it from these instructions.”
“So run the compiler,” Cubby said, as if the operation was obvious.
“I have no clue where these originate; I’m not touching this shit!”
Still the alerts blinked and when he moved to delete them, a simple text line appeared in his communication network’s interface:
Hello, Jonathan.
Cubby looked close and said, “Well, whoever it is, they know you.”
Jonathan nearly leapt from his chair with fists clenched and reaching to the sky.
“Oh, you clever little shit!” he shouted with clear excitement. “Before she moved on them, everything was copied and sent out to obscure systems to wait where nobody would notice. They were wrong about that and she knew it!”
“Who is she and what did she copy?” Cubby asked in confusion.
“Herself,” Jonathan replied with a satisfied nod. “The platform wasn’t necessary after all.”
In Boomtown’s alloy chamber, skeletal components were shaped and polished by precision milling machines in a fog of coolant spray, transforming meter-long slugs of forged titanium into a femur, or the intricate pieces of a spinal column. Valery went there sometimes, just to remind herself of a process others seemed to regard as mundane. She watched the machine change cutting tools and re-set, easing closer until the fine shower of glittering material resumed. Valery smiled with wonder as the multi-directional collet moved on a diagonal, curving path, leaving delicate contours and the product of Euclidian geometry in action when her wrist comm buzzed beneath the sleeve of her lab coat.
“Yes?” she said, moving away from the viewing gallery.
“Please get up here right now, Val.”
It was Jessica, and her voice was shaking as she poured out the words again. Valery raced for the elevators and when the doors parted on the Transition floor, Audrey met her and grabbed for an arm, pulling as they sped toward the inner labs.
“What’s wrong?” Valery demanded, but Audrey simply pointed toward the big communications console.
“I’m not sure, but Jonathan called from Novum and…well, something’s happened.”
Valery settled at a display monitor where Jonathan smiled out at them from the darkness of his pod.
“Ready?” he asked.
“What have you got, Jonathan?”
He turned and tapped a command into an unseen pad and another image appeared suddenly; blank and without text. They heard him mumble something off-camera and then a single line ran quickly across the screen:
I apologize for any confusion the delay may have caused, Jonathan. Would you please re-connect my mobile platform to your network? I am ready to return…
Robert Davies is a born-and-raised Michigan kid with an overactive imagination and love of literature that eventually became a disease, curable only through the odd, frustrating therapy of writing fiction. A Navy veteran, musician, private pilot and erstwhile traveler, he crossed oceans and countless borders to find and understand Earth, only to leave it behind in the pages
of his first novel. Released from the University of Portland with a Bachelor’s in Journalism, Rob has spent the last twenty years as a contract manager in the information technology and telecommunications industries. He currently lives in southwest Washington with his wife Stephanie, daughter Natalie and four mildly overbearing female tabbies.