Page 3 of Ensnared By the Rabbit Genius
At the same time, though, and because I now knew that the commander was fully aware of my presence, I figured it wouldbe polite to introduce myself. My orders hadn’t said I couldn’t do that any more than they’d said I had to be covert, so why not be real with him? Maybe then I could walk around with him instead of behind him.
“Excuse me, Commander Heremod?”
He looked over at me from his seat facing out on one of the picnic tables and smiled. “Hello, Ellis. Would you like to join me?”
Well, that made me pause. He knew who I was? “Did, um, Director Stubbins tell you about me?”
“No.”
Okay. Maybe I hadn’t been wrong to think the commander had gathered intel on me after all.
“Have a seat,” he said. “Have you already eaten?”
I sat down and shook my head. “I didn’t have time to grab something.”
“You didn’t eat yesterday either.” He started fishing around in his bag. “You should make time to eat regularly.”
Before I could figure out what to say to that, he got a flat piece of metal from his bag and used it to cut his sandwich in half. He wiped the metal off with his napkin and dropped it back into his bag before gesturing to the half of the BLT that he’d cut for me. Wanting to be polite even if this was a little weird, I wrapped it with a napkin and picked it up.
“What else do you have in there?” I pointed at his bag.
“Random bits.”
I took a bite and chewed. Man, the thick-cut bacon was divine. When he didn’t say more, I offered, “I liked the robot.”
“They’ve confiscated it.”
“Why?”
“Anything created on FBI grounds belongs to the FBI.”
“I don’t…” I squinted at him. “Are you sure that’s a thing?”
He shrugged like he wasn’t bothered one way or the other. “It’s in a darkened container at the moment, but the next time it can see, it’ll escape.”
Good grief. “You programmed it to escape?”
He cocked his head at me. “Wouldn’t you?”
I had to think about that for a second. “Is your A.I. sentient?”
“Not quite yet.”
Wow. Not quiteyet?“Are you working on it?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“When time permits, we talk.”
For some reason, that startled a laugh out of me. He talked to the artificial intelligence in order to help it gain sentience during his free time? Like one day it would suddenly gain self-awareness after a rousing discussion of…
“What do you talk about with it?”
He shrugged. “Anything it wants to discuss. Lately, it’s been curious about cell division after initial fertilization.”
Holy shit, the Norlons wereso farout of our league.
