Chapter 89

Chapter 89: 89 "Misha," said Melody in a quiet voice, leaning towards me a little. "I thought you can’t speak Chinese." I stared at her, then realised that me talking to Amethyst must look really weird with us both speaking different languages. "Oh, uh..." "Do you have a tail?" asked Coral, her eyes fixed on something on the ground. I leaned over and saw that my tail, which I had been keeping tucked in a loop around my waist had gotten free and was now twitching back and forth like a cat’s tail in plain view. "Uhh..." And that was when a phone rang. I quickly got to my feet and stumbled over to the wall and the phone charging from it. I’d put the phone on a little stool I’d found under the kitchen sink so the poor thing didn’t have to sit in the dust all day. But it turned out, I’d underestimated it’s charging capabilities, or perhaps the cable and adaptor I’d bought were just that good. "Hello?" I said after putting the machine to my ear. As expected, the number had come up as some string of numbers I didn’t recognise so I was half expecting to have to tell a telemarketer that I wasn’t interested in whatever they were selling, but I was wrong. "Misha? Hello, this is Xu Yidi and-" "I’m here too," I heard Zhan say in the background. "And Zhan’s here too." "Oh, hello," I managed to reply. That string of numbers I didn’t recognise had turned out to be the very phone number I was supposed to have remembered! No way I was telling Zhan that. "Everything okay?" I asked. "We solved the issue with Cheungyi." It was Zhan who said this, now sounding a lot closer. I guessed he’d grabbed the phone from Yidi. "What issue?" I asked. "You know how the portal disappeared and Yidi went offline? That was because Cheungyi came in." An image of a furious Cheungyi filled my mind. "Is... Yidi okay?" I asked quietly. "Oh, he’s fine. I’ve already bandaged him up." "Bandaged?!" "Okay, okay, that’s enough." It was Yidi’s voice this time. "Misha, have you seen the presentation?" "I... I’ve seen a bit." There was a bit of silence as the enormity of what was going on reared its head again. "What happens now?" I asked. "Now... well, right now the SSD is calling an emergency meeting," replied Yidi. "Makes sense," I said. "What about Whale Toes? Aren’t they having a meeting?" "About that... Cheungyi actually told us something..." Yidi’s voice crackled and I heard some muffled scraping. "The reason she came in to check on me earlier," said Zhan, "was because she lost contact with Yeung Serng Yin. She and the rest have gone missing." -- The room was light and airy despite the circular rows of computers and rows of seated engineers tapping away behind them. These desks looped around one central structure made mostly, it seemed, of computer monitors with reams of information flowing across them. Bran kept quite as he followed behind Arthur and Mrs. Amaranth and observed the goings on in the room. Each desk had at least two monitors and each person had a headset that most were talking into. Those that weren’t talking seemed to be listening and would sometimes nod in agreement. Perhaps it was the circular shape, or perhaps something else, but the place somehow reminded Bran of a giant brain - one comprised of human neurons. "How many testers do you have running right now?" asked Arthur. Mrs. Amaranth called out to someone and one of the engineers at the computers looked up and gave them a wave. "Mr. Penn needs information," Mrs. Amaranth said as she led them over. "It’s good you’re here Arthur," said the guy at the computer. "See here? Fluctuations all over the place. And here? There’s almost a sixty percent rate of complete failure." "Let me see..." Arthur leaned closer and traced the numbers in the spreadsheet with a finger. "Give me the detailed statistics of this one." The engineer tapped at his keyboard and the screen shifted to another spreadsheet. Bran understood none of it but he got the general vibe: The Unity had begun testing of its fancy new product and it wasn’t going well, though, based on the serious but not too serious expressions on everyone’s faces, it wasn’t all that bad. Or at least, was within expectations. "Tell sections one-three-seven and seven-oh-oh to stop for now and reroute their energy quotas to the rest," said Arthur. "Got it." After a few moments, someone closer to the centre of the room gave a shout, though Bran wasn’t able to catch what about. A few more heads poked up from among the monitors and eventually Arthur and Co headed there too. "We’re over the bar!" said someone excitedly, which was presumably a good thing, judging from the smiling faces. Arthur gave a relieved sigh. "Continue to scale back the number of concurrent operations until we’re thirty-percent past the Avon line, then slowly scale back. Try to test to see where exactly the cut-off point is. It’ll be important for optimisation later." "Will do!" The excited engineers scurried back to their computers and Mrs. Amaranth was called away by some other assistants who looked to be in the same job as her just less senior. That left Bran and Arthur alone, or at least, somewhat alone among the large group of people tapping away. "It’s not easy getting a tech start-up going," said Arthur quietly with a chuffed little laugh. Bran gave a polite nod but didn’t speak. He was resisting the urge to touch the computers and see if they stopped working. He was feeling as destructive as he was curious at the moment. "Would you like to see the actual testing?" asked Arthur. When Bran was young, he remembered his father, the one whose surname he now carried on, also taking the same tone with him when bringing him to his work place. He’d been a car mechanic and then a manager of car mechanics. The tour of the workshop had been during the manager stage. "Okay," replied Bran. Despite sounding, and probably being, quite important, these ’testers’ were really just people in a room over spaced out between different desks with reams and reams of paper being fed through portable printers while the people swiped away on phones. But as Bran watched, he saw about half of the people put down their phones and their printers stop moving. After a minute or two, one of the people stood and walked to a block of wood that was sitting in the centre of the room and stuck the sheet of printed paper on it. A moment passed then... A beautifully ornate wooden table appeared where the block of wood had been. The other testers in the room clapped as another staff member came in to switch the table with another block of wood. "Do you have energy problems?" Bran asked Arthur. Arthur smiled and planted his hands on his hips. "Naturally," he replied. "As with everything, it’s the source, the energy, that truly decides our limitations." "If the Nameless Beast can only give you a small amount of energy, why keep using it as a source?" asked Bran. Just based on what was going on in the room and what he’d seen up to this point, he had a rough idea of how the operation worked. "The Nameless Beast is a relic from a bygone era, yes, but it is still a wonderful source of power, the only trouble, is that right now it has a collar on it." "A collar?" An image of the mound of flesh poked with eyes came to mind, except this time it had a dog collar on it. Not the most settling of images. "That’s a bit of an odd thing to say." "Is it? Perhaps I’ve been in the lab for too long. You see, there’s a seal on the thing, a limiter that prevents more than a trickle from flowing out of it. We’ve tried different solutions, but nothing’s worked well enough so far." Things clicked together in Bran’s mind. "And that’s why you want me," he said. "You think I can break this seal." Arthur looked genuinely surprised by this but pleasantly so. "You are correct," he said, "but before you refuse, I want to show you more about our project here. See if maybe you’d be interested-" "I can’t break the seal," said Bran flatly. "I admit, I can channel certain energies that have a superior cutting power, but it’s nothing too impressive. If you’ve tried other methods, which I’m sure you have, and they’ve failed, then there’s no point asking me to try." A shadow of something dark crossed Arthur’s face but it only lasted a moment. "You can’t truly know something unless you give it a go, don’t you agree?" Bran gave a noncommittal shrug. "You kidnapped me. Why should I help you?" "I don’t have a good reason," was Arthur’s easy reply. "I’d been hoping to pike your curiosity with all this, but if it’s not meant to be, then it’s not meant to be." He turned and clapped a hand on his son’s shoulder. "I’ll see you out."