Synthesis: Book One Page 11

  Chapter 11

  “Are you sure they won't bother us?” Kelly asked one more time.

  Caleb rolled his eyes for the first time in his new form. “Yes, I'm sure! Now get your bags packed, I have a private plane waiting for us outside of the city.”

  “Where are we going?” She asked in an exasperated tone.

  “I'll tell you when we're in the air. I made arrangements with the pilot. He's ex-Spetsnaz, an old Soviet special forces soldier. I wired him a pretty penny to be our private pilot for a while.” Caleb said.

  “Oh, neat.” Kelley said. She was feeling rather out of the loop as she stuffed her bags. Caleb had been out of the tank for only forty hours, and he was already the over confident guy that she knew him as when he was a computer program.

  The paparazzi had not troubled them since the explosion. Caleb knew it was because the general public thought everyone at the Genetitech facility was dead. The news feed covering the explosion kept panning from the eye witness accounts, and back to the giant hole that used to be Genetitech. Amidst all of the news debates and op-ed pieces, he and Kelley had simply vanished in plain sight.

  Before heading out of the lobby, Caleb printed out a stack of papers from the hotel's printer. As the last paper made its way out, he turned and grabbed Kelley's luggage for her.

  “Weren't you here for a month?” He asked. The small suitcase had him puzzled.

  “I travel light.” She said defensively.

  “Fine. By the way, I'm gonna need your phone.”

  “Sure. I don't even think its charged-” She pulled the phone out of her purse right as he grabbed it and tossed it into the bubbling fountain in the hotel entry way.

  “Hey!” She protested.

  “Sorry. Your phone was bugged. It was a hardware level tweak, so I couldn't bypass it. The guys who are after us were using it to track our every move. Let me guess, Evan gave you the phone?” He asked while the valet brought his battered car around.

  “Yes.” She said quietly. Every mention of that man's name made her scared and angry at the same time.

  “Look, it’s no big deal. By the looks of it though, we're gonna have to get real creative for the next couple of weeks. The guys chasing us are pros.” He placed their bags in the trunk as he spoke. Afterward, he came around to hold her door open for her. She blushed slightly, and took her seat with a demure smile. Even with the scariest people in the world chasing after them, he still made an effort to be the chivalrous guy she had programmed him to be.

  “How creative?” Kelley's hands reached out to hold on as she closed her eyes. Caleb had insisted on driving, regardless of the fact that the last time he did he got reverse and forward confused.

  The car rocketed away from the front of the hotel with a slight chirp of the wheels. He up shifted the speeding car with talent anew. With the cityscape sliding by, she opened her eyes and gave him a suspicious look.

  “I thought you couldn't drive.” She asked.

  “Well, I can now. Let's just a say I'm a fast learner.” He smiled.

  After winding through the jungle roads, they came to a remote airstrip. The entire facility was abandoned, except for a twin engine jet and a guy sitting underneath the plane's wing peeling an orange with a large knife. The man wiped the knife on his gray pants and stood as they approached.

  While Caleb loaded their luggage on the plane, Kelley made what little small talk she could with the stilted English of the pilot. Caleb came up and patted the man on the back. They both spoke fluent Russian back and forth like it was something Caleb did every day. When they got on the plane, she cornered him about his linguistic acumen.

  “Where did you learn to speak Russian?” She asked.

  “You programmed me to speak it. Remember?” Caleb responded.

  Kelley wracked her brain to remember when she would have done that. Then, she remembered the programmer from Moscow that had done some of Caleb's initial source code compiling. “Oh yeah, one of the early guys on the project was Russian. I totally forgot. I guess that'll happen when you work thirteen hour days for five years in a row.” She lamented. The plane's jet engines were throttling up, and the quiet cabin hummed and shook a little as they taxied onto the main runway.

  “How good is this pilot that you hired?” She wondered while she looked out the little window by her seat. The spacious cabin was setup for private charter, and she was able to sit close to Caleb in large and luxurious suede leather seats.

  “His name is Nikolai. Nikolai Sokolov. He's a great pilot. I checked out some of the missions he was involved in when he was enlisted. As long as you keep him sober, he's good to go.” Caleb said with a casual shrug.

  Nikolai chimed in over the intercom in his stilted English while the plane finally lifted off the tarmac. “Well, we made it off the ground. Feel free to help yourself to what's left of the vodka.” He punctuated his statement with a slight burp.

  “Well, maybe he's not that drunk?” Kelley offered optimistically.

  “I'm sure it'll be fine.” Caleb said while he rubbed her leg in reassurance.

  After the plane was at altitude, they both breathed a sigh of relief. The quiet cabin served as a sort of cocoon, and Kelley stopped worrying about where they were going. Instead, she cuddled up against Caleb and smiled in his warm embrace.

  “Caleb?”

  “Yeah? What's up?”

  “What happened when you first got out of the tank?” She asked.

  He gave the question some thought before he finally spoke. “I cried.” He said simply.

  Kelley stirred from her spot under his arm and sat up to look at him. “Really?”

  “Yeah, it was weird. I researched what it would be like when I finally became, you know, human. There was nothing anywhere that really documented it. So, when I initiated the finale of the procedure, I came out of the tank naked as a jay bird and just crouched on the floor and cried. A lot. It was weird to feel everything at once. I had never felt anything before. I think that's why newborns cry too, but it's hard to really explain it. I was feeling everything, and my mind just overloaded.” He placed his arm around Kelley again, and she laid back against his side and listened to him breath for a bit. She stirred again at the sound of his voice. He was gently trying to wake her. The thought of how his heart beat was only a couple of days old was bizarre to her in such an amazing way.

  “Kelley?”

  “Yeah?” She said in as distracted haze.

  “Why did you get together with Evan?” He pondered aloud.

  She was dreading this conversation, and she was hoping to have it much later in their relationship. She wrung her hands and fidgeted as she spoke.

  “I don't know. When you went through the Initialization, they were all saying that you would find somebody else to be with the second you got out of the tank. It really hurt to think that we spent all of that time together, only to have you become real and walk away with some other girl. I guess I wanted to beat you to the punch.” She tried her best to stay rational and collected, but her tears were giving her away.

  “Kelley, I went through all of that to be with you. Only. You. That was my only directive in this whole process. I knew that there would be strife and angst and violence, but I still did it because I needed to be in your world. Even if it meant risking everything, you were my only focus. To hold you once as a real man would have been enough to justify all of this.” His deep voice resonated in her very soul, and she cursed herself for ever doubting his pure motives.

  “God, I must seem like such a bitch right now.” She said in a sullen voice.

  “Hey, it was a confusing time for you. I promise not to judge you for things that are out of your hands. This whole situation is happening two steps ahead of you. You reacted the best way you could.” Caleb rolled her hands around in his as he consoled her. She felt herself falling under his masculine spell, again. It was her fault for programming him like this. It was even weirder to see all of that programming and source
code come to life in front of her as the secure, confident, and powerful man that he was.

  “Thanks.” She said with a crooked smile, her spirits lifting already. “So, what were you printing out at the hotel?”

  He sat up and reached into his back pack. The large sheaf of papers were crinkled and dog-eared at the edges from his hasty packing.

  “These are some of the people we will have to deal with at some point.” He said with a serious look in his eyes. He leafed through the stack dutifully until he came to a few pages that held his interest. Kelley looked at the information on the page while Caleb explained it to her.

  “This is the head of 'corporate resource allocation' for Brookstone Security Consulting, Inc. His name is Boone Allen, but that's probably just a bad alias. He's got experience both as a trained thief, and as a hired mercenary. His main job is to turn employees at a company into paid informants. After that, he gets sensitive info from them and hangs them out to dry while he sells the data to their competition. If that doesn't work, he starts intimidating his mark until they're compelled to do his bidding. He's a real piece of work. Interpol has at least five murders that he is a prime suspect for, but they can't catch him because he's basically nomadic. From my research, he's the one who turned Evan to espionage. Only with Evan, he was all too willing to go rogue. Charlie Dent got rolled into it by association with Evan. Since Charlie was already sort of crooked by some of his work with DARPA, he had no problem going full black.”

  She looked at the mug shot of the man on the paper. He looked like a trained hit man. His shaved head gave him an almost alien appearance, and a scar ran from his forehead up into where his hairline would have been. The look in his eyes was what truly gave him away. There was no emotion there at all. He was just a pale, almost reptilian, figure staring at the camera.

  “God,” she uttered.

  Caleb handed her another paper. This one had a corporate identification picture of a woman who looked to be in her early forties. She had dark hair that was cut to a short, almost pixie cut, length.

  “This is Ivanna Rossi. She's the CEO of a multinational conglomerate that buys up bio tech companies and technology. Even though she keeps a low profile, her name is attached to some of the most unethical and brutal technology grabs in the industry. If you thought the guy before her was bad, you're in for a surprise. This woman has called out hits on no less than ten engineers and chemists, and that's just what's coming up on the Internet. She's most likely killed people with her bare hands, but her history before taking the reins for 'Allied Biotech Inc.', is kind of murky.”

  “So, how does that make her any worse than the bald guy?” Kelley asked.

  “Well, she does most of her work in person. She prefers to 'take care of' loose ends personally.”

  “Oh. But, she looks so nice.” Kelley said, taking the paper to get a closer look at the woman who looked like Tinker bell all grown up and in a business suit.

  “Well, looks can be deceiving.” Caleb said simply.

  Changing the subject from the bad guys, Kelley asked, “So how were you able to do that thing to the ground? The one that got us out of the cafe?”

  He cleared his throat and leaned back in the seat again. “It's kind of hard to explain.”

  “I have time. I also programmed you, so you sort of owe me anyway.” She teased mildly.

  “Alright, fine. The way I do it is by controlling automated and computer controlled systems with their own passive radio signals. You see, every electronic device gives off a radio wave of sorts. Even for things that can't be controlled remotely, you can still pick up a wave signature. With what I learned from Tesla's work, I was able to create a method that allows me to intercept and communicate with those devices.”

  “Wow...” she said quietly.

  “There's a catch though. You see, I need to have a fair amount of adrenaline, or dopamine, in my system to be able to do it. When we were at the cafe, those guys threatened to hurt you, and it was enough to stimulate the adrenal response to initiate the ability. I guess. It’s still sort of murky to me too.”

  “So, if you're scared or angry, it changes how you're able to do this thing that you do?”

  “Yes. I'm actually kind of interested to see what I might do if we are ever in real danger.” He said.

  The thought of somebody with Caleb's power on a rampage was unsettling to Kelley. “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “I wish it wouldn't, but I have a feeling that it will.” He said.