“Pfft,” Lei snorted. “That’s rich, comin’ from the lady who poached one of their most valuable assets and then walked off the job.”
“If turning you into a puppet would improve the situation, you bet your ass we’d hand you over ourselves,” Narain added coldly. “You’re just lucky it happens to be the exact opposite in this case. These senile old farts are too in love with their comfy assembly chairs to have any idea what’s actually going on outside. They don’t get that Coeus is docile right now, and that taking you hostage is the single stupidest thing they could possibly do if their goal is to prevent him from going on an apocalyptic rampage.”
“As an old fart myself, I’d submit that I don’t believe senility has anything to do with it,” said Professor Beckmann with a sheepish grin. “Make no mistake: this is a flaw in the corporate hierarchy system, not in any of us as individuals. The further up on the ladder you go, the more abstract your responsibilities are, and the more distanced you become from where the actual labor takes place. Yet it’s only then, when you’ve lost all perspective for what conditions are like for the folks out on the ground, that you have the authority to make decisions that will deeply affect them, and usually they’re not very good decisions. But this is nothing new, of course. Workers have been complaining about incompetent superiors since they built the pyramids at Giza.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to clean up the boss’s mess. Especially when you know they’re making a mistake. Just part of the job,” said Narain. He’d always had a penchant for shrugging things off as “part of the job” but this didn’t seem to me like the purely pragmatic course of action, so I didn’t quite buy it. “Not to mention, it’s what Phoebe told me to do. She’d kill me if she found out I let them take you.”
This gave me enough cause to turn my head and look Narain in the eye. His expression was that of a man who’d gone his entire life taking the Titan network’s word as gospel, and took comfort in the knowledge that he had its seal of approval in any given course of action. Now I understood why he’d done it: he trusted a Titan’s judgment over that of his superiors—something I found a bit strange given that this was the same judgment which had torn his family away from him.
“Phoebe told you to keep me safe?” I asked, and Narain snorted.
“Yeah, you want to know what she said?” he said, then affected a mocking feminine tone of voice as he imitated her inflection: “If you let the UNDP get their hands on Seika, I’ll be very upset with you. She’s a good friend of mine. How would I be able to sleep at night?”
For a moment, my jaw hung slightly open, dumbfounded. But then the corners of my mouth curled up into a smile, and I coughed out a laugh. I couldn’t help but be amused by her ever-audacious way of speaking. And here I thought I was the one who’d become rapidly smitten with her after our last conversation, but apparently the feeling was mutual.
“Well, I suppose that about sums it up, doesn’t it?” said Professor Beckmann. “We all have our own justifications, but at the end of the day, you’re a good friend of ours, and it’s safe to say we’d all be losing sleep if you were to be captured.”
I nodded, smiling. While I felt a bit bad that these three were putting themselves at risk to take this insane course of action with me, it was reassuring to know we had a Titan on our side. And I certainly didn’t want anyone to suffer on my account, either. So we would defy the UNDP, and run until our legs could carry us no further, the four of us versus ten Titans and the world. As my newfound resolve settled in, I looked to Narain.
“We’ve got a phrase to describe times like this in the business world,” said Narain, his expression so dour that it cast his next words in a somewhat dissonant light: “Sometimes, you’ve just gotta do the job because it’s a job worth doing.”
9
The motor grew quiet, and the truck slowed to a stop. It was now 10:40 AM—about fifteen minutes since we’d first stowed away in the back of the truck. At Narain’s direction, I put on a face mask, a hat, and sunglasses.
“This is where we switch vehicles,” he said, putting on a similar disguise. I looked at the map on Lei’s holofield; we were currently making a beeline through a residential part of East Palo Alto up the southwest side of the San Francisco Bay. We hadn’t put much distance between ourselves and the Twelfth Intelligence Base at all. “We’re going to keep making our way up along the bay toward the strait, doing everything we can to throw the network off our scent as we go. Good news is they don’t even seem to have noticed that we’re gone as of yet. All we’ve got to do now is hold out until closing time, and we’ll be in the clear.”
“Sorry? Closing time?” I asked, puzzled.
“He means when the meeting concludes,” said the professor. “Once the rendezvous is over, Coeus’s processing power will be freed up, and we’ll be safely under his protection once more. The only major unknown here is what might happen during the meeting itself. There’s no way for anyone to plan around that. We don’t have any idea how long it will take.”
I was still in the process of adjusting the focus on my mental lens that would give me a clearer picture of our current situation. The four of us were on the lam in the middle of Titan-controlled territory, and were going to keep running for as long as we could, all the while chipping away at the network’s ability to pinpoint us. If we could hold out until Coeus and Phoebe were done with their interaction, then I would presumably be safe from any would-be captors. We had to keep ourselves hidden, and also pray that nothing went wrong with the meeting itself, or else my reunion with Coeus would likely not be a very pleasant one.
“Okay, time to go,” said Narain, gripping the handle on the door at the back of the truck bed. But the handle didn’t budge; the door was locked. “Damn. Did they find us?”
“Nah, pretty sure they’re just taking preventative measures at this point,” said Lei, scrutinizing the data rushing past on his holofield. “Looks like they have seen through our little dummy, though. But I made sure we didn’t leave enough of a trail for them to trace us, so they’ve probably just decided to remotely engage the locks on any facility vehicles that entered or exited the base in the last couple hours. Don’t think they’ve pinpointed us just yet, but I don’t want to take any chances. Can’t draw their attention to this truck in particular. Which means…”
Lei got up and walked deeper into the truck bed and shoved some of the stacked-up cargo aside with his foot. Underneath was a large burned-in square where it looked like someone had taken a blowtorch to the floor. Lei stamped on it a few times, and it quickly fell out from beneath his foot, crashing loudly down onto the ground outside.
“…we’ll just have to take the emergency exit.”
10