A short stack of printed pages slapped down on the table in front of James, over top of where he sketched cartoon robots on loose paper. The eight-year-old halted and picked up the foreign pages, reading over the impossibly long title. “What’s this?”
“Scholarly journal article,” his father said, planting himself at the table across from James with a mug of black coffee.
The boy perused the excruciatingly small print. “What’s it for?” “It’s a primary document. I’ve told you about them,” came the curt reply. “You remember what they are, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean yes,” James amended. He rattled off a definition, “A primary document is a report from research someone did themselves.”
His father nodded, reclining back with an air of indifference. “Very good. We’re going to go over one of these every day.”
Dread prickled through James’ insides. “Why?”
“Because you need to learn about my field. And you need intellectual stimulation worthy of your gifts.”
James flipped a page over and scanned the thick, unintelligible columns. Even the graphs of the results made no sense to him. “What is—” He paused as he silently tried to sound out the word,
“Ace-till-cho-line?”
“It’s pronounced ‘uh-seetul-koh-leen,’” his father snapped. “Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter.”
“Oh.” James had heard about neurotransmitters.
“It seems we have our work cut out for us,” his father sighed, looking at his watch. He stood, washed the rest of his coffee down the sink, and strode to the door. He donned his coat and shouldered his black briefcase.“We’ll go through that when I get back. Concentrate on your studies today.”
“Yes, sir.” James watched him go, then got up and pulled the schoolwork list off the refrigerator. Words overwhelmed the strip of paper, as usual. Luckily, his mother had written this one.
She had better handwriting.
James sat pinned between the wall and the conference table, sullen and withdrawn.
“Now, let’s sort all this out, then.” Vihaan Dhar, a middle-aged history professor type, with sturdy posture and a well-kept black mustache, let his gaze wander around the table. “What happened?”
The engineers exchanged uncertain glances, seated across from Dhar, Richard, and Eve. Dhar’s attention rested squarely on James. “Siles, care to start us off? Since you were most directly involved?”
“I’d love to,” James sighed. The particulars of the event had kept him awake most of the night.
“With as much detail as you can,” Eve added, pushing her square glasses higher on the bridge of her nose.
Evangeline Fabienne Pérez Delva was an anomaly in every circle she entered. Large-boned and athletic in her early seventies, she and her wife were nutrition buffs and avid hikers, and while she was something of a giant in the tech world thirty years running, she actively thumbed her nose at what she called the “shiny corporate bullshit” that often went with the territory. She was a brilliant civil engineer, with a rare talent for both science and people.
The first time James had ever seen her was when she gave a guest lecture at his university, easygoing and extroverted in an auditorium full of unkempt, socially terrified engineering students. She’d had a thick cloud of STEM majors around her the whole weekend.
James had just about died when Larkspur accepted his internship application two years ago, an arrangement that had since turned into a permanent position. But he would never admit that to Eve.
James laced his fingers together on the table, wondering if they were discussing a fireable offense that morning. “Okay…Well, I went in the generator room to make the last checkup of the night, and I noticed the room was warmer than it was supposed to be. I only had time to pull up the status screen for the generator and thermoregulatory system and see it had frozen up before the alarms activated.”
“What time was this?” Dhar asked.
“10:46pm.” Every feature of that glitched had been etched in his memory.
“So there were no prior warnings that something was malfunctioning?” Eve asked.
“Everything was fine when I’d checked it just an hour before, and none of the sensors went off,” Addie Matthews spoke up to James’ left. He had worked with her for the entirety of his time at Larkspur, and still knew little about her personal life. Though once, he’d heard her mention that she grew up in an ultra right-wing religious cult and seemed to have since renounced it.
“The core’s temperature should have easily triggered the automatic failsafe, but that doesn’t appear to have happened,” James said. “Nothing was going through the pipes by the time I got to them, so I’m thinking the cooling system was either damaged, or had been disconnected. I tried to flood the system with the emergency water valve, but even that was jammed.” He gestured to Richard. “That’s when Richard found me and made me evacuate.”
Richard glanced at him.
James couldn’t meet his gaze. Never in his life would he have expected his boss to have to all but drag him off the machinery platform. James should have had more maturity, more self-restraint, even though he hadn't realized at the time that this particular evacuation was a matter of life or death.
“I’m told you think it’s sabotage,” Eve said.
James felt like a bullseye as all attentions trained on him again. “Nothing about the generator’s design or the scope of its safeguards suggested it would behave the way it did,” he said. He pushed aside a memory of the unresponsive valve under his desperate hands, alarms screaming in his ears, Richard’s voice nearly failing to clear the din. “Someone had to have tampered with it. Blocked the pressure outlets, fed it an unstable source material for conversion. Something.”
“Could there have been a problem with the irrigated water supply?” Richard asked.
“Still waiting to hear back on that,” said Dhar. He looked around the table. “And where were the rest of you while this was going on?”
Greg Harper, a tree of a person with a heavily freckled face and an overbearing personality to match, spoke up, “We were all in the main lab working up blueprints for that android project commissioned last week. It was James’ turn to check the generator, so he stepped away for a bit.”
“How long was he gone?”
“A few minutes?”
“Did any of you see anything out of place before this point?”
“No,” Chelo Fernandez said. A fellow graduate from James’ alma mater, her direct demeanor and formidable creative prowess had greatly intimidated him during his internship, but she had gradually earned his trust with positive reinforcement and offerings of mandarin oranges. She glanced around at her colleagues. “It was just the five of us out there, wasn’t it? Nobody was on security duty?”
“The last shift of the night had ended over half an hour before,” said Addie, reaching behind her head to gather her long blond braid and pull it over one shoulder. She cracked a thwarted smile. “I would suggest we check the video surveillance recordings for anything suspicious, but of course we can’t.”
“And our remote backups of the footage from that night don’t show anything out of the ordinary,” Richard said.
“Seriously?” James said. His mind turned immediately to video tampering, but it would take particular skill or very high access to edit the user log as well. He guessed even Richard didn’t have that kind of clearance.
“Larkspur doesn’t have any enemies, does it?” Richard glanced at Eve. James perked up.
“Not that I’m aware of,” Eve replied. “Most everyone who still remembers Larkspur thought we went under almost twenty years ago.”
“This is the worst kind of thing to happen if we wanted to stay behind the scenes,” Greg mused. “The whole county is buzzing. I agree it seems out of left field, but we have no apparent perpetrator. James, are you absolutely sure it wasn’t just an accident, because it’s perfectly fine if—”
“It wasn’t an accident,” James said. “We’re smarter than that.”
“Mistakes can be made by any of us,” Greg said. “Even you.”
James bristled. “I didn’t do anything to it.” “He didn’t say you did,” Richard said gently, pushing up on the bridge of his broken glasses. “We just have to consider every possibility.”
“You can safely consider that possibility a dead end,” James said, avoiding looking too long at Richard’s glasses.
“But you do actually believe it was sabotage?” Greg pressed. “Despite a deafening lack of evidence?”
James threw up his hands.
After a beat of charged silence, Dhar checked his phone and pushed his chair back. “Well, I’ve received word about where we’ll set up shop next. I’ve had my assistant making phone calls and looking into the Bureau’s assets still invested in this little engineering lab of ours. Seems like the outlook is promising. Talk amongst yourselves until I get back.” He paused at the door. “I know you’re all shaken by this, but let's try to work together, all right?”
Richard studied the friction between James and Greg in concern. Chelo and Addie exchanged a glance. James crossed his arms and Eve sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“Thanks, Greg,” James muttered as soon as the door closed behind Dhar. “I can always count on you to make me look bad in front of the head of the Bureau.”
“You’re the one who got defensive,” Greg said, failing nonchalance. “I haven’t gotten a rise out of you like that in quite a while. Is there something you aren’t telling us?”
James frowned at him from the corner of his eye. “Like how I’m aware that, since I largely designed that monitoring system, this could, actually, be my fault? And that there’s no way to recover the tech to get some sort of readout of what exactly happened to it, so we’re all just going to blame me for being the last guy in the room?”
“You said it, not me,” Greg retorted over Chelo and Addie’s heads.
Chelo dealt Greg a sharp elbow to the arm. “Stop bickering.” “Sorry,” Greg mumbled, shifting away. He massaged his affronted arm, redirecting his attention to the brooding James. “All I’m getting at, Surly, is there’s really no evidence for or against you. I don’t doubt your confidence, or the quality of your work. But accidents do happen, so you can be as adamant as you want but we’ll still never know for sure. At any rate, crying ‘sabotage’ isn’t helping you.”
“So we’re just going to ignore the possibility,” James muttered. “How responsible.”
“You’re being paranoid.”
He hated making mistakes, especially ones that impacted others’ work. But things going sideways was part of the job, and although it was sometimes a gut punch, he had always been honest with his coworkers. Hadn’t he?
Had he really given them reason to doubt his integrity?
“James…” Addie said softly as Chelo gave Greg another warning expression. “I know what it looks like, but nobody had reason—”
“I collaborated on those designs and signed off on them,” Chelo said. “For all we know this could be my fault.”
“There was nothing wrong with that system.” James leaned forward so he could see her better, his hazel eyes hard and stubborn. “You of all people should be backing me up here.”
Chelo looked at the table.
“Will we receive results of the investigation?” Addie addressed their superiors across the table.
“Yes,” Richard said. “But it doesn’t seem like they’ll find anything. The site’s too dangerous to pick through with that sinkhole.”
James crossed his arms again and sat back, morose.
In the ensuing silence, Eve said, “It’s only the first day. Things will start looking up soon.”
Dhar entered with several sheets of paper in hand and said, “Looks like you’ll be moving back to the old facility near Worthing.”
He was met with blank stares.
“Worthing?” Greg said, worried. “Like west coast Worthing?”
“Afraid so,” Dhar said.
“That’s a good facility,” Eve said. “And above ground too, which sounds better to me after recent events.”
“Agreed,” Richard said. “Though I think we’re all worried about the distance…”
“It’ll be better to have you back near the Bureau’s main office again.” Dhar handed James copies of the location information, who received them wordlessly, took one sheet, and passed on the rest.
“The original facility’s been closed down for years.” Eve scanned the page. “How much renovation will it need?”
“I’ll take care of that.” Dhar returned to his seat next to her. “How much time will you need to relocate?” Again, silence closed in on the narrow room. Worthing was on the opposite side of the country. Over a thousand miles away.
James decided to let the others figure out what they wanted to do. By the end of the week, he’d have already gone through work withdrawal and taken up tinkering with other projects on his kitchen table. He didn’t have anyone else to move but himself. It wasn’t his call.
He didn’t feel like arguing anymore, anyway.
“Heather will be out of school for the summer in about three weeks,” Richard said, thinking. “I’d hate to pull her out that close. Would a month be too long?”
“A month should be fine.” Dhar jotted notes on his phone. “The danger of complete exposure isn’t particularly high. If the Dunesborough Police Department isn't releasing information—which they have express federal orders not to—people can speculate, but nothing will be able to be traced back to us.” He considered everyone around the table. “Would a month work for the rest of you? We’ll compensate you for moving expenses and any lease breaking fees.”
James nodded. The remaining engineers confirmed, numbly.
“Great.” The head of the Federal Bureau of Science and Innovation swiped into a different app on his phone. “Mark your calendars, then, for Monday, June fifteenth as the date to report to the new facility. Let me know if you have any questions.”
The engineers clutched their handouts, exchanging uneasy glances.
“I know it’s a lot to ask of you,” Dhar said. “But I do think this will be a good move. Nineteen years is a long time under the table. Maybe after relocating, Larkspur can start expanding again, resurfacing. We’ll shelve the generator for now until we have more information, but with this work safety android project you’re moving into, I think you’ll soon find some more resources coming your way, if I have any say in it. I’m pretty partial to this group, to be honest.”
“Thank you, Vihaan,” Eve said.
James stared at the table, pensive. He hadn’t been at Larkspur that long, so he knew nothing about its origins, or what resurfacing meant.
