The AI made no reply.
“Did it freeze again?” Jacob asked sympathetically.
“Yes.” He came to sit next to him with a sigh. “I know we’re still a minute and a half ahead of schedule but let me help you with this.” He began to sort through the cords. “Okay…well, the reason you think your cord has three ends is that you have one of mine. Gimme. No, not that one, that one—yes.” He tugged at it. “Feed it through.”
“The senator’s plane just landed,” Amber called across the room.
“Fuck—feed it through quickly.” Nick looked around the room a little desperately. “We don’t have much time.”
“By the way, Nick, the game restarted.” She leaned back in her chair to look at the screen. “Aaaaaand you’re dead by pixie.”
“Son of a—” He sighed. “Okay, clean-up first, then I’ll respawn and I’ll find a way to punt that AI into next week.”
The computer dinged and she looked at it again. “You have two new skills—Inadvisable Threats and Skynet Protocol, both level one.”
By the time Tad and Mary walked into the lab, it barely resembled the same place. Nick and Jacob had been busy bundling cords, which now lay tied together neatly and adhered to the floor with clearly marked pathways between them.
Still, the new arrivals looked around with wide eyes and worried expressions.
“What is all this?” Mary asked. “Is there a…problem?”
“Oh.” Amber scanned the room. It looked so much neater than it had twenty minutes before that it was difficult to see the problem, and she studied it carefully with fresh eyes. After a moment, she realized that however neat the arrangement of server blocks and cords might be, the area did look more like a server room than a medical facility. Even the lighting had been dimmed to keep the temperature in the room down and only the light directly above Justin’s pod was on.
It looked like something out of a dystopian sci-fi film.
She bit her lip. “Oh, dear.”
“I’m sure it’s all fine,” Tad said comfortingly. He squeezed his wife’s arm. “I’ve seen many places in a panic, my dear, and this doesn’t seem to be one. As long as they aren’t panicked—”
The unmistakable sound of a zap and an exclamation cut him off in mid-assurance, and all the lights went out except the LEDs on Justin’s pod. A large generator roared to life in the distance and the lights flickered on a moment later in time to reveal DuBois, who wandered from behind a stack of servers with his hair sticking up on end.
“Sorry about that,” he said vaguely. “Wrong plug. I’ll fix it.”
“Wait, your hair actually stands up on end when you get shocked?” Nick looked at Amber in disbelief.
“I don’t think that’s the takeaway here.” She pivoted to the Williams and plastered a smile on her face. “As DuBois demonstrated for us, we now have a chain of independent backup generators as well as a battery within Justin’s pod. Any disruption to the main power grid will have no effect on its function, and if everything else is shut off, we have thirty-six hours of power to the pod if we need it.”
Tad’s mouth twitched and she thought he was enjoying this more than his wife. “I see.”
“Now, Mrs. Williams.” Amber guided the woman to the table where Nick had been playing the video game. “We’ve perfected the controls so that you can also play the video game. Because we know your primary purpose isn’t to play, though, we’re working to set a number of teleport points so you can move your character to wherever Justin is in order to speak to him. You also have an invulnerability buff—ah, like armor? Yes—and are universally coded as not being a threat. Nothing will attack you.”
From the look on Mary’s face, she hadn’t considered the idea that she would need to play the game.
“One of the issues we can’t control,” the engineer continued, “is Justin’s sleep and wake cycles, as well as the speed with which he processes information. To make a long story short, having what he perceives as a brief conversation could take hours or days. We’re working on a couple of fixes for that, although it seems like his reaction times are improving.”
“Ah,” Mary said. She cleared her throat. “Well, thank you very much. It seems as though all of you have been busy.”
“We have.” Jacob gave her a tired smile. “Thankfully, one of the express provisions given by our mystery donor was that we could spend as much on coffee as we needed to.”
“Do you have any idea yet who it is?” Tad asked. His voice was a touch too casual and Amber began to see the strain in him.
“Not yet,” she told him. “I’ve managed to find a few of the hospital’s major donors as well as the causes they support, but I haven’t found anyone who seems like a match.”
“Of course,” the senator said. “I should have known that would all be published somewhere.”
She cleared her throat and hoped her cheeks weren’t red. The truth was that, although the donors did need to be named, no dollar amount was required to be published. That information had been obtained via slightly—or wildly—less than legal means.
Thankfully, her two partners both knew her well enough to know that she needed them to break into the conversation at this particular moment.
“Justin’s progress seems stable,” Jacob reported. “The leaps ahead we saw him make a week ago have held. It wasn’t an anomaly and seems, instead, to be real improvement.”
Thankfully, the couple was diverted.
“So he’s getting better,” Mary said. She looked relieved.
“There has been no forward progress since then,” DuBois said and appeared at exactly the wrong time to offer the unvarnished truth. He studied his blackened fingers before he looked up to see everyone staring at him. “Jacob is quite right, the progress is indisputable and a holding pattern is good.”
“It’s…good?” The woman didn’t seem to believe him.
“Asking for more right now would be like…” He raised his shoulders in a surprisingly artful shrug. “Asking someone with a new hip to walk a half-marathon. They could probably do it in extremis, but it would set their healing back. Slow and steady is what you want.”
“Ah.” Both of Justin’s parents nodded.
“And how are matters on your end?” Nick asked them politely. “Senator, we caught a piece of your speech earlier. It was quite well-articulated.”
“Thank you.” But Tad’s smile had disappeared entirely. “Unfortunately…it looks like we may have a complication soon. The media has caught wind of some part of this. I don’t know how, exactly, although I have my suspicions, and I don’t know how much they know. But I can tell you how they’re spinning it. The insinuation is that this procedure hasn’t received FDA approval because it is dangerous and that I know it’s dangerous but decided to pull him out of the hospital and have you experiment on him.”
Amber covered her face with her hands.
“Oh, no,” Jacob managed to croak.
The only sound in the room was DuBois crunching popcorn. When everyone looked at him, he shrugged.
“Wasn’t all of this already happening?” he asked. He shrugged. “They had the project blocked last time and they threatened to blackmail the senator. The difference is that now, we have funds to keep going.”
Amber stared at him.
“He’s right.” Mary’s voice was low and clear. “Thank you, Dr. DuBois. We all knew they would try to give us bad press, but we also know this is the best course for Justin and many other patients. We need to keep working—although I realize I shouldn’t include myself in that. Nick, would you mind showing me some of the fundamentals of the game?”
Amber stood aside as the group swung into action once more. DuBois was right that this wasn’t anything new.
On the other hand, it reminded her exactly how uncomfortable she was about the fact that their donor was still a mystery.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Is everyone ready?” Lyle stroked his bushy beard and looked at
Zaara and Justin.
“One moment.” She rearranged her cards.
“Come on, human. How long can it take you to read those? You’ve had ʼem all in your hand.” Lyle shook his head at Justin. He added in a stage whisper, “I’m starting to think she’s not too bright.”
“There’s no need to be rude,” Zaara said mildly and for a moment, Justin thought he could see the young gold digger her father had tried to raise with perfect manners and an artful tilt to her head. “After all, this is a new game for me. Oh! What’s that?” She pointed across the tavern.
“What?” Lyle turned to look, and the young man watched with weary amusement as she switched several cards between her hand and the dwarf’s. A ball of multicolored light danced in the corner of the tavern to which she’d pointed.
Lyle drank his beer while he watched with a slight frown and when the bright globe faded, he looked at the table. “I dunno why that keeps happening, but it sure is pretty. Wait…hic…you can see it, too, right?”
“Yes.” Zaara did not mention that she had pointed it out in the first place.
Or, as Justin could plainly see, that she had been the one who created it. She was smiling, all innocence, as she laid her cards out on the table. “Is this a good hand? I wasn’t sure so I bet low.”
“Never tell people why ye bet the way ye do,” the dwarf said. He looked at her hand, narrowed his eyes, and looked at his. “Wait. I had that card.”
“Are there two of them in the deck?” she asked and laid the innocence on with a spatula.
“No, I had it in my hand.” He gave her a hard look.
“You had it in your hand in the last round,” Zaara told him. “Remember?”
Lyle swayed in his seat and hiccupped. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Unbelievable,” Justin muttered. A moment later, her boot connected with his shin and he winced. “Ow!”
“Eh?” The dwarf gave him a look. “Did you get hurt killing that wizard, Justin me boy?”
“No,” he said. “I’m merely marveling at Zaara’s luck this evening. Ow!” He rubbed his shin and glared at her. “Also, I seem to keep hitting my shin on this table.”
“How sad,” she said sweetly. “You haven’t shown your hand, by the way. Maybe you won.”
“Yes.” Justin took a sip of his beer. He had almost adjusted to the fact that the game’s graphics didn’t show the beer moving when he moved the mug—and the fact that he could only half-taste the beer. It was only a memory of what it tasted like, after all. He laid his cards down. “Ah, no. Lost again. How sad. You know, it doesn’t seem to be my night. I think I’ll bow out and watch you two play.”
SORE LOSER, LEVEL 2 popped up on the screen and he rolled his eyes. It might be his imagination, but it seemed like the AI had been snarkier than usual.
“Eh,” Lyle said. He slid a small pile of coins to Zaara. “That’s the last turn for me or I won’t have any for my next pint. This one’s having all the beginner’s luck.”
“Yeah, that’s what it is,” he responded blandly. This time, however, he lifted his legs out of the way as she kicked and was rewarded by the sound of a boot hitting the chair leg and her muttered oath of pain. “Is there a problem, Zaara?”
“No,” she said, with dignity. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He grinned and put his feet down.
POKER FACE, LEVEL 1 the game announced. REALLY BAD FLIRTING, LEVEL 1.
“I am not flirting,” he whispered under his breath. His cheeks flamed suddenly.
“What?” Zaara looked at him. From her expression, it seemed as if she genuinely hadn’t heard him.
“Uh…I said… That’s not…Murting.”
“Who’s Murting?”
“Someone I know.” Justin hastened to extricate himself from the conversation. “Hey, look over there—oh. Hey. Look over there.” To his utter surprise—and relief—something was going on. The town crier had come in with the week’s new bounties, each stamped with a seal of approval from the mayor’s office.
A few chairs scraped, and assorted people stood to peer at the new posters. Sephith, the wizard who once ruled this valley, had attracted a steady stream of adventurers, and over the past week, several had arrived in East Newbrook. With him now defeated, they were all looking for alternate employment.
Justin hadn’t seen Zaara leave the table but a moment later, she sat and slid a piece of paper across the table. “I took the best one,” she said with a wink.
Had that wink always made his stomach flip? He shook his head to clear it. She wasn’t real and was merely a collection of pixels run by an AI who hated him. With his luck, she would ask him out as a joke and he’d be laughed at by an entire pixelated village.
He took a moody sip of his beer and wished it were real before he took the piece of paper to read.
“Ruins. That could be good.”
“Could be good?” Zaara flipped her hand and uncurled her fingers to show the key they had salvaged from Sephith’s castle. “There are three keys. We have one and no one’s even heard tell of the other two for years. Ruins might be the only place to start tracking things like that.”
“As long as there’s loot, I’m in,” Lyle interjected. He hiccupped. “I’ll go get more beer.”
“He’s right. You’re right.” Justin blew a breath out. The group had scrounged a few minor missions but nothing that paid well, and at this point, they barely covered their stay at the inn. “We should go to the ruins. But…” He held a finger up. “We should also get a few smaller jobs with easy payouts—something to fall back on.”
“Those are so boring.” She tossed a piece of bread in the air and caught it in her mouth.
“Your first mission was defeating a necromancer wizard, but they won’t all be like that, you know.” He raised his eyebrows at her. “Mark my words, you’ll find out that adventuring is equally as boring as the life you ran away from.”
“Really?” She leaned forward on her crossed arms. “You think adventuring will become as boring as sitting in a backwater nowhere village, doing needlework and practicing my giggle to impress a nobleman.”
“Um…” He had to admit she had a point.
With a grin, Zaara hurried to the board and pulled down another few jobs. She returned and waved them under his nose. “A missing wedding ring and a wolf going after sheep. I hope that’s boring enough for you, Sir…”
“Sir…” Justin prompted.
“I can’t think of anything.” She sounded annoyed. “Dammit, and I wanted it to be such a good insult.” She looked up as Lyle joined them. “Lyle, we’re going to do tiny adventures.”
The dwarf gave her a dubious look and hiccupped, but he shrugged. He was not, the young man noticed, carrying another mug of beer. The bartender must have guessed that he wouldn’t see any coin for it.
“I’ll go,” Lyle said. “And by the way, when will we go back to Riverbend for that ten gold? I’ve told people about the money I’ll have coming in, and it’ll be good if, you know…I can pay them for things. We defeated the wizard.”
Justin rolled his eyes. “Yes, but the Mayor won’t pay us.”
“He won’t?” The dwarf looked outraged.
“The reward,” he said patiently, “was for rescuing Zaara and she doesn’t want to go back.”
“Trust me,” she said, “he wouldn’t pay you anyway. He only put up the sign so someone would come to East Newbrook, find me, and drag me back. Then he’d string you along and smooth-talk you. Believe me when I say you two aren’t missing out on anything.”
“I still think he should pay us,” Lyle grumbled.
“You haven’t been in this business long, have you?” Justin asked him. He stood. “Either way, we won’t get that money tonight and we need to pay for our stay at the inn. How about we go see the farmer and kill that wolf?”
The dwarf followed them as they headed out into the night. He muttered quietly, as much to himself and an ima
ginary audience of other dwarves as to his companions, so the other two ignored him.
“I’m sorry my father’s a jerk,” Zaara said after a while. “I know ten gold would help you.”
“Yeah,” Justin said absently. “I don’t know. I guess I don’t understand why you’re still here, though.”
“What do you mean?” She walked with her hands resting on the hilts of her daggers.
What do I mean? He had no idea, and as he tried to find the answer, he made the mistake of starting to talk. Some people could come up with a nice speech on the fly, but he was not one of them.
“It’s dangerous out here, that’s all.”
“You don’t mind,” she pointed out.
“I’m stuck here, remember?”
“Oh, right.” Zaara shook her head. “I keep thinking that one of these days, we’ll see a poster with your picture on it and it’ll say some madman escaped.”
The AI snickered.
“Are you laughing at your own joke?” Justin asked under his breath. “Seriously? Come on.” To her, he added, “Very funny. First of all, that’s clearly Lyle.”
She snorted with laughter.
“Second of all,” he continued, “you don’t have to believe me. I don’t expect you to. It’s merely…true.”
“If it were true, wouldn’t you sit around, drink beer, and wait to wake up?” she asked practically.
“I don’t know. It seems not.” He rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you?”
“Oh, you are insufferable.” Zaara drew her knives.
“Whoa! Hey!”
“Justin.” She waved the knives at him. “Look over there.”
Justin turned to look and stopped in his tracks. A massive shadow slunk around the tree line nearby and toward a pasture where he could see sheep grazing. As it moved into a gap in the shadows, the moonlight glinted off brindled fur.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “Are we sure that’s not a…you know…bear?”
“Wolves are big. I thought you knew that.” Zaara set off briskly. “Come on, Lyle, we have a rabid wolf to kill.”
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