Whatever emotion showed on my face, he took it as disbelief. “Look, you saw us talking. We’ve been talking a lot since she broke up with Sandy.”
I glanced around. While Emmy and Sandy’s relationship might have been an open secret for some people, it was possible that saying it aloud might force someone to take official notice.
The people in line for the door ahead of us weren’t close and no one stood behind us. On the other hand, there were people coming in our direction—Art and Zola. I hadn’t been wrong in thinking that Art was both a good six inches shorter and 20 years older than I was. It did surprise me that he could get away with wearing a “Rick and Morty” t-shirt in an office environment. On the other hand the shirt’s message, “I’m not arguing. I’m explaining why I’m right,” fit Art well enough. Continue reading Truth and the True: Part 5→
In order to power the abilities that supers have, humans need to be changed. The standard Abominator practice involved implanting genes that allowed humans to absorb energy not only from our reality, but from others as well. The Abominators were working to set things up so that they controlled which humans could use the powers they’d gained.
At the point where they’d designed the True though, they were at a point where those genes weren’t fully understood or as effective as they’d eventually become. So, they were trying to design human soldiers that used a lower level of energy, something a normal human body could produce. Continue reading Truth and the True: Part 4→
With everything going on at Higher Ground, you’d think that I’d work on that and nothing else, but life wasn’t that simple.
We’d gotten to that point in the semester when the tests begin to appear and papers along with them. Electronic engineering and materials science weren’t majors with a lot of papers, but I did have to turn in a couple of short ones explaining the technical choices I’d made on projects. The tests weren’t bad—Dr. Strazinsky’s calculus class asked about material I’d learned on my own and “Principles of Photonics” was interesting enough that I couldn’t ignore it. Continue reading Truth and the True: Part 1→
“Are you imagining that I brought weed along in my backpack? Or maybe guns? Bombs?”
I grinned at Stephanie, knowing that she didn’t expect any of those things. This was likely her way of hinting that any bugs I set in the offices or anything I might be carrying to control them might need to be hidden better or removed.
Stephanie rolled her eyes. “No. I was thinking you maybe had a jackknife.”
A couple cubicles away, Victor laughed. If there were an art to saying secret things in public, we seemed to have mastered it—or maybe that was just her. Continue reading Jekyll Or Hyde: Part 11→
On the bright side, I was an intern. Interns are inexperienced and haven’t absorbed how things are done in the workplace. That meant that as long as I wasn’t too obnoxious about it, I could ask anything.
Provided I wasn’t too obvious about my prying, the worst that people would think was that I was naive.
Vaughn and I took his car to Hardwick Industries downtown offices and the helipad after class. It felt a little showy to ride there in a Porsche, but it wasn’t my Porsche.
It had the additional advantage of not leaving my van where it could be inspected by Hardwick’s people. The van passed as a normal van, but if anyone started poking and prodding it, they’d discover that the material wasn’t quite metal. If someone who knew the model of van it was supposed to be measured it, they’d discover that the measurements weren’t quite right. Worse, they might figure out that most of what you could see underneath was a facade. Continue reading Claws & Eyes: Part 4→
After looking around for a moment to find the source of my voice amid the chatter mechanical hums of the lab, Victor stood up in his cube and faced me. “Breakthroughs with the user interface? No. And believe me, I’d know. That would bring everything in the lab to a stop. Why do you ask?”
Now that was something I hadn’t thought through. Why would I be asking about the user interface, something I wouldn’t be working with at all? “Well, you’d said that that you were having people from that other lab come here. I didn’t phrase it well, but where do we need the help? Is it the user interface? Does it need power? Something else?” Continue reading Deeper In: Part 8→
“It sounds like they were close enough that they should have kept it somehow—not that I think we shouldn’t have it. It just seems inefficient to have us start from zero on it and only bring them in a couple years later.”
Victor shrugged. “It’s the government. I think I heard that they moved it someplace so secret that it practically disappeared for a year and half. Except people do know it exists and what it does. According to government records, when the supers fought the Abominators, the Abominators used it to create clones, engineer new supers, modify supers that already existed, and even heal their people.
Knowing that people sometimes noticed when the implant threw me a lot of information, I steeled myself for the onslaught and did my best to keep my face neutral.
The implant informed me that I had more than 30 messages to download. The majority were from the Xiniti High Command, informing me of military actions that the Xiniti had taken part in and how monitoring the Human Quarantine was going. According to Xiniti intelligence, the loss of a noticeable percentage of their fleet had caused the Human Ascendancy to withdraw from a number of worlds they’d been threatening to occupy.
That was new information. “I didn’t know he was married.”
Stephanie glanced over toward the lines of cubicles and back to me. “Office rumor says that she’s in California most of the time and I happen to have met her on one of her visits here, so I can confirm that. For the record, her name’s April and I kind of like her.
“Funny how Sandy can do the awkward geeky guy thing at the same time he does the executive screwing the secretary thing. I never thought it was impossible, but I wasn’t looking for an example.”
