Something Resolved

  “So, when’s the wedding?” asked JR at the breakfast table and Ian nearly choked on his bacon.

            He and Danny had now been engaged for little over a month and they had decided on waiting until the whole Aaliyah debacle had been resolved before even starting the wedding planning. In truth, Ian had hoped that his friends would forget about their engagement with all that was going on.

  “We’re waiting for Ed to return with Aaliyah,” said Danny.

  “At this rate that might only be in a hundred years” said JR.

  “What’s a few hundred years for the promise of an eternity together,” said Ian and leaned closer to kiss Danny.

  “You say the sweetest things,” she said.

  “If you two are going to start making out, I’m going to leave,”

  “Hell, if I’d know it was that easy to get rid of you,” said Ian with a devilish smile and JR threw a piece of bacon at him, which he caught and promptly ate.

            Ian had a few stops to make after breakfast. Danny had the day off, so she tagged along. With the events that had transpired the last few weeks, they hadn’t had a lot of time together though things were slowly getting back to normal. Their first stop was the Scorpion HQ.

  “Colonel,” said Ian as he entered her office.

  “Special Agent Erasmus,” she greeted not unkindly.

  “Yeah, about that,”

  “I was wondering when you were going to bring the bad news,” said the Colonel.

  “Yeah, I was kinda hoping not to have to do this, but unforeseen circumstances and all that,”

  “Nothing I could do to persuade you?”

  “No, not really. And I’d prefer not to go into detail of what kinds of circumstances, if that’s okay,”

  “I’ve learnt not to question the shit storm that follows you, Erasmus, but I will miss cleaning up after you. Will you still hunt hackers and lead us to them, at least?”

  “I might, if I can find the time,”

  “Maybe is better than no in my books, good lick out there,”

  “To you to,”

            Their next stop was the Project 8 offices where Ian checked on Devon and his progress. From time to time he would still send Devon some code blocks so that he didn’t feel he was the only one working there, but their game development was coming along at a glacial pace.

  “So, when do you want to charge the Cage?” asked Devon as they sat drinking coffee.

  “Soon, preferably before the end of the week,”

  “That’s not a lot of time, not if you want to train JR,”

  “I know,” agreed Ian and looked over to where Danny was busying herself with the resurrection of their dying office plant.

  “When’s the wedding?”

  “Oh, would you guys just forget about that already?” Ian said jokingly. “Not until all this shit is resolved,”

  “You know it will never be resolved. If it’s not some hacked using Betsy to kill people, it’s some random agency kidnapping one or all of us. Or there’s some conspiracy, or the Others try to kill us, or some crazed scientist develops some new virus and is hell bent on lacing the planet with it,”

  “Fair enough. We’ve put it off for now, at least until Ed’s back with Aaliyah,”

  “You think he’s going to come back with her while he’s got that Russian with him?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t really picture him the type,”

  “Any man’s the type if tits and c-”

  “Stop right there, Danny’s here,” warned Ian.

  “I see worse every day,” said Danny.

  “Either way, if she puts the moves to Ed, he will falter,”

  “I don’t think so,” said Ian, “granted, he has taken an interest in her but he has some honour,”

  “How sure are you of that?”

            Ian had no answer for Dev on that question. He wanted to say he was sure but something stopped him. Even on the drive to Stronghold Prime he kept asking himself the question in the few moments of silence that prevailed between him and Danny.

  “You aren’t focused,” said Ian in frustration after thumping JR into submission for the second hour.

  “I am!” he shouted and rushed at Ian, trying to land slow powerful blows that Ian dodged with ease.

            JR was getting annoyed, and the more annoyed he got the worse his swordsmanship became. It got so bad in the next then minutes that JR barely got up before he was lying face down on the ground again.

  “That’s enough, Dragon,” said De Beer as he entered. “You don’t want to kill him,”

  “I’m far from dead,” said JR as he got to his feet slowly. “But in need a smoke,” he said.

  “Outside, if you will,” said CNet.

  “Yes, yes, outside,” said JR as he placed the blunted sword back in the weapons rack and headed outside.

  “You think I’m pushing him too hard?” asked Ian once JR was well out of earshot.

  “Yes, I do,”

  “You don’t know JR very well. He’d push himself to the brink of death if he wanted something,”

  “And what does he want here, sparing with you?”

  “To beat me, what else? JR likes winning, almost as much as Devon,”

  “And what happens if he can’t beat you before the end of the week?”

  “He won’t. JR doesn’t have the training we have, even this is nothing compared to what the Others of the Agency put us through in the first day, let alone the first week,”

  “True enough, but we were made of sterner stuff,”

  “Just because your family owns diamond mines, does not make you unbreakable. I’ve proven that more than once,”

  “I’m only here because of that snake of yours living in my house,”

  “That snake saved your family’s life, you’ll be grateful for that in the end,”

  “We’ll see,”

            Ian left JR to practise by himself for a while so that he could spend some time with Danny, who had fallen asleep in one of the master bedrooms. He lied down next to her and stared at her for a while. She worked herself to death most nights to save the lives of people she didn’t even know.

            Most people would argue that it was her job, but he knew better. She thought of it as more than a job. Ian had had that once, sure he enjoyed his coding and the game development, but that was more of a hobby anyway. After the Fall, he had lost his true calling and now he might have a chance to get it back. The question was, what it would cost.

  “Commander,” CNet whispered.

  “Yes?”

  “Something has changed,”

  “Changed how?”

  “Stronghold Romulus, I’m receiving minor status updates but I am still unable to connect to the CNet instance there,”

  “Any idea why?”

  “The CNet instance might be deliberately blocking me. I’ve run a number of simulations based on the assumption that Ed had indeed traveled there. None of them are good,”

  “Why? What did you simulate?”

  “Possible AI insanity caused by infrequent defragmentation. If the CNet instance there had become technically insane, it would no doubt be paranoid, it would consider any and all intruders as hostile,”

  “That’s fine, Ed would be able to handle that,”

  “Yes, no doubt he would destroy the AI core and replace it with another core, possibly one of the VI cores. What I fear, however, is that the CNet instance in Stronghold Romulus would have corrupted the VI cores, or even flashed them and rewrote himself onto them,”

  “How probable is that?”

  “It is what I would have done,”

  “It is what you did,” Ian corrected him.

  “And I was sane, I can only imagine I would have done much worse if I were insane,”

  “How many of your probability simulations end with Ed stepping into Stronghold Romulus and not ending up lynched by an insane AI,”

            There was a disconcerting pause, then CNet replied.

  “None,”