《Open Source》Chapter 9

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Screens again. The girl swiped at the enormous one opposite her bunk and cleared out all the lines of text. Clumps of it clung to the pulsing substrate, sticking stubbornly against the drift as if they were a pile of ash, and she were blowing it away. Not at all the turn-of-the-page transition I was used to from such things. It cleared to reveal, oddly enough, the same scene I’d watched earlier, after the introduction of the Haggarty code.

“…what’s going on in that head of his anyways?” It was Britt again, still in front of the holoscreen in the lab. The girl still stood beside him. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed, but the afterglow must have worn off enough for them to talk of something else for a while.

“You mean Miller’s?”

“Yeah.” He turned to face her, taking his eyes off the code for the first time since watching Miller leave. “Subjects! What kind of a moron introduces subjects this early in the process?”

“I don’t know,” the girl responded, aimlessly. “He sounded pretty confident that this new variant was going to solve the recombination problem, and we’ve been working so hard for such a long time that we just felt like we needed to see some–“

“Wait a while….you KNEW about this?”

“Well, uh, kind of.” She shuffled her feet, and adjusted her grip on the console. “He may have mentioned it this morning, but I thought he was joking around. I didn’t know he was actually going to do it, and, well…you know how he gets.”

Britt sighed. “Yeah. I do. That’s what I’m afraid of. Why didn’t you step in?”

“I don’t know. Normally I would have, but he seemed so sure this time, and he just went on about what a breakthrough it would be, and how it was going to change our craft, and the world by extension, and…I don’t know. I guess I just got caught up in all the excitement.” Twice she tried to meet Britt’s gaze, and twice she failed, her impish little smile falling sheepishly away. “His passion is just…it’s infectious!”

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“Yeah, I know. But it’s my job to make sure that passion doesn’t get us shitcanned. We’ll have to have ourselves a chat.” He checked the door Miller had exited, then the timer on the screen. He watched as it ticked off it seconds. “What kind of subjects did he use anyways?”

“Ah…coneys, I think. The white ones,” she braced for the tongue lashing she was clearly expecting.

“CONEYS!?!” Britt’s posture tensed, and for a moment it looked like she was going to get it. Then his shoulders slumped again, and his excitement, and perhaps partly some fatigue, overtook his outrage. For the moment, at least. “And why, pray tell, would he skip straight to them?”

“Because the mice are pregnant. Both of them. He didn’t want to put them through anything that might compromise the litter.”

“And the gerbils?”

“Well…uh…we’re out of gerbils. We lost the last pair testing out those regen haploids last week.”

“Ah.” Britt, regarded the data again. Perhaps he was seething under the surface, and imagining all the things he’d like to do to Miller. Perhaps he was merely remembering the days when he’d been culpable of such, and he was finding understanding.

He found something interesting on the control panel and studied it for second or two. His finger traced a pattern that, even from my view on the holo, I could tell was just an idle waste. The code behind him bubbled and squeaked, perhaps a hint more violently than it had before. “You two aren’t, ah…involved, are you?”

She turned towards him. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened as they opened wide. Her lips curled in an embarrassed smile. She was pretty, I decided. More so than I would have guessed. “What?!?” She squealed.

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“Well! You work together all the time, you’re both single, and you’re relatively young. And God knows we’ve been down here long enough for anyone to get a little antsy, I don’t care who you are. Is it really such a stretch?”

“No!” She smiled coquettishly at the front of her coat. “I mean, he does have a certain charm about him, and I can see why you’d ask, but…no, I could never do anything like that!”

“Funny,” the girl said. The real girl, in the room, watching the holo by our side. Not the one in the replay. “I believed that at the time.”

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