“Now, let’s be reasonable,” I replied. “We both know that this safehouse will eventually be destroyed by rampaging cyborgs, and everything in it will be destroyed along with it. That includes this ottoman, so why not just make use of it?”
“That only happened to one safehouse, Tycho,” Raven pointed out.
Veraldi didn’t bother to try to reason with me. “Feet off the furniture,” was all he said, and all he apparently meant to say.
“Is that Tycho’s voice I hear in there?” called Andrea Capanelli, our commanding officer and my sometime friend.
“It’s me, Andrea.”
She walked into the room, brushing her now shoulder-length blonde hair out of her eyes. “Welcome back. How did it go?”
“I located Rosenstein, got him alone, and had a talk.”
“Uh-huh.” She was watching me skeptically, uncertain of how to take my mood. “Elaborate.”
“He said the trafficking crew he worked with were employed by David Kote.”
I didn’t think she necessarily needed to hear about the encounter with the bodyguards, or how I had left Rosenstein.
“David Kote?” asked Andrew Jones. “Astrochemical Technology Group, David Kote?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Rosenstein explained to me that those were genuinely evil people who set no value on human life. Unlike him, of course.”
“He probably believes that,” Andrea replied. “Everyone’s the hero of their own story.”
“She’s absolutely right,” Jones quipped. “I have no idea how evil I actually am.” He was lying halfway down on another couch, playing with a puzzle box.
“Oh, please,” said Raven. “Unless you’ve switched combat roles and become a sniper, I don’t even want to hear about it.”
The funny thing was, Raven was easily the most caring individual in our entire crew. She was the only one I could consistently count on to show human emotional responses like sympathy or concern.
“David Kote…” mused Andrea Capanelli. “We’ll have to find out everything we can about him—who he’s talked to, where he’s been, finances, friends, all of it. Can you handle that, Andrew?”
“Sure thing,” he replied. “Full dossier on your desk.”
He didn’t mean that literally, of course. The dossier would actually be sent from his dataspike to hers, the usual method of sharing information.
Thomas Young came back into the room. “Are we starting the meeting yet?”
Capanelli replied, “Tycho was telling us what he got from Geoffrey Rosenstein. Seems like the human trafficking network is run by the industrialist David Kote.”
Thomas frowned. “David Kote? Hmmm. That does seem to match some of the rumors about the man.”
“Rumors? Like what?” she asked.
“That he’s got some interesting tendencies,” Jones added.
Capanelli turned in his direction. “What do you mean by that?”
“It’ll all be in my report,” he replied. “I don’t remember the details without checking, but that’s the gist of it. It’s dark stuff.”
Capanelli turned back to Thomas. “Does that match what you have?”
Thomas shrugged. “I don’t have anything other than hearsay myself. But yes, the man has a nefarious reputation.”
“Nefarious.” I chuckled.
“It’s an apt term,” was Thomas’s reply. “I’m sure we’re all extremely interested in what Tycho was doing while he was back on Mars, but wasn’t the actual purpose of this meeting to discuss what I’ve been up to?”
Thomas Young was an egoist, a narcissist, and an all-around genius.
“Yes, of course, Thomas,” Andrea soothed him. She sat on the back of the same couch I was sitting on. “Please tell us all about it.”
“Oh, one moment. I’ve forgotten my notes in my room.” He disappeared, although we could all hear the sounds of boxes being moved, if not thrown aside, and of paper being crumpled.
“Is he actually working from paper notes?” I asked, confused.
Raven grinned at me. “He says it’s the best way to memorize complex topics.”
Thomas came back out with a large stack of loose papers as well as a black and white notebook. His eyes looked half-mad, like he had just been forced to do something no one in their right mind would ever volunteer for. “I am ready.”
“Okay,” said Andrea. “Everyone listen up. Apparently, there is quite a lot of it.”
He looked confused for a moment, then he glanced down at the huge supply of seemingly random papers in his hand. “Hmm? Oh, did you mean this?”
Then he methodically shuffled through the stack of papers, threw all but two sheaves on a nearby coffee table, and turned back to us. He proceeded to scan through the papers in his hands rapidly while muttering to himself in a distracted voice, then he looked up and said, “The process of recovering data from Julian Huxley’s body is a complicated one.”
We all sat there in silence, waiting for him to say something else. Anything else, really. He failed to oblige us, and instead just stood there staring while we gave each other anxious glances. Finally, Andrea said it. “Thomas?”
“Yes?”
“Thomas, I know there’s more to your report than just telling us it’s a complicated process to recover data from an android body. We already knew that.”
Julian Huxley was a wealthy man, the chairman of Huxley Industries. He was also something more than that, although my belief went back and forth on just what he really was. According to Huxley the one time I met him face-to-face, he was born as a man named Pyotr Vasily Vasiliev on November 9, 2015 and lived 14 human lifetimes since then by imprinting his mind into a new body every time the old one became too sick and frail. Eventually he imprinted himself into an android and continued to exist for a while as a being of pure data. That’s when I met him, though he was shot to death only moments later.
“Sorry, I think it’s time to write the note-taking project off as a failure.” Thomas put the last two sheets of notes aside, ran his hand through his hair, and turned away from us. “It’s frustrating. The fact is, I can’t make any further progress on recovering any data from Huxley’s body without new parts.”
“New parts?” asked Andrew. “What new parts? The man died—”
Andrea held up a hand to stop him. “Thomas, all we need to know right now is what you have so far. That’s what this meeting is about. I sent you a memo, remember?”
He waved a hand dismissively. “Yes, I remember. But how am I to tell you what I have so far? None of you grasp the underlying principles...”
Thomas was being unusually difficult, even for Thomas. I glanced at Raven, who shook her head just slightly to tell me to keep my mouth shut. I sat still and waited, and Thomas slowly began to open up.
“I can extract certain sequences, certain patterns of code, and I can compare those to existing patterns in my database to look for known similarities, but translating any of that into meaningful physical-world information is an incredibly slow project. The way things stand right now, you could employ a thousand men working around the clock to sift through the mountains of raw data I’m generating, and it would still take years to distill anything that might get us the slightest bit closer to the Eleven.”