Page 41 of Ezra
I’ve never said a woman’s name. There’s an intimacy, a closeness in uttering a name in a sexual act. I’ve never felt comfortable enough with any lover to say her name.
Can’t let that happen again. Get yourself under control.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Katrina murmurs as we pull up behind the museum, “how pissed would the department be if anyone knew we were here?”
“Twenty,” I reply as the car parks and deactivates. “So let’s ensure that doesn’t happen.”
I haven’t told Deion yet. I’ll send him a message after I’ve had my second look around. He’s said a few times that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission, so I’m taking his words to heart, so to speak. Considering I don’t technically have one. Or so I’m told.
We get out of the car. I follow Katrina to the back exit as she pulls a fob out of her purse and waves it over a sensory pad, activating it. She then places her hand on it, and that unlocks the door instantly.
“That’s a rather old-fashioned security measure, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Dr. Vaughn doesn’t like relying on too much technology to keep the museum safe because if it short circuits, the power goes down, we get hacked, or something else goes wrong, everything inside will be vulnerable.”
“How do you figure?”
Katrina hums as she studies the building for a moment. “When I was in high school, our internet went out one day. The tech was so interconnected, it took everything down with it. Our metal detectors, our capability to call the police or emergencyservices... Technology takes us forward, but then it hurts us when we suddenly don’t have it.” She pushes the door open and holds it for me. “Sometimes simpler is actually better.”
Nodding, I ensure the door shuts behind us before pulling up a map of the museum’s interior and homing in on the café. I turn to Katrina. “Thank you for this.”
“You don’t need to thank me,” she whispers, glancing at a nearby security camera. “I want justice as much as everyone does. The sooner you catch them, the better.”
“Where does security store their footage?” I ask. No doubt the cameras are still recording even now. Easy for me to fix once I can touch the control console. “Some of the video feeds provided to the unit are incomplete.”
“This way.” Katrina waves me along and takes me down several corridors to a storage room where a vacant desk rests surrounded by old screens.
“This is practically archaic,” I remark as she steps out of my way. “I’ve never seen a system like this one. Most security cams upload data directly into clouds now, and password protect them automatically.”
“Dr. Vaughn is old school, like I said,” Katrina replies. “Normally, there’d be night security here at this hour.”
“It’ll take me some time to sift through this.”
“Do you mind if I take a look around?”
“No. I’ll be erasing footage and putting it on a loop.” I glance at her. “But I recommend you stay away from the café.”
“Trust me,” Katrina replies, turning, “I’m not going anywhere near there.”
I spend several hours trying to make sense of the security feeds. The system is so old—USB ports and copying video recordings manually—that I cannot simply make things happen with a touch, like I often can with current tech today. I have toresearch old instruction manuals to operate it all properly, and even then, everything’s cumbersome.
“No wonder they built me,” I mutter to myself as I finally get the current footage spliced the way I need it to cover our presence here. At the same time, this experiment is precisely what I wanted to perform in the first place to confirm a hunch. I compare the slight flicker of the video data the museum provided the department to the flicker of my own tampering with the footage, the only tell that something has been cut.
They’re the same. The timestamp on the bottom left of the footage skips forward seven minutes.
Somebody at the museum is hiding something. Perhaps a TerraPura collaboration. But who?
I can’t spend all night here trying to come through the museum’s entire catalog of dated USB ports, all piled haphazardly in bins. Sorting through it manually is slow work, even for someone with a lightning-fast CPU. I’d need at least twenty-four hours to thoroughly scan every security upload for tampering, and that’s twenty-four hours I can’t spend holed up here.
But what I have found is enough for me to go to Deion and move the ACU to seize them all before further evidence can be destroyed. Then we can continue our investigation.
We’ll have to begin questioning employees.
But that’s a problem for another time, another day. After erasing all evidence of our presence here tonight and similarly constructing a security feed on a loop so we aren’t detected, I exit the surveillance room, walk down a corridor, and head into the heart of the museum. It’s strange in the dark. I’ve been to this place before on a family trip with Deion and his family, his children excitedly chattering as they viewed dinosaur bones and the holographic, life-size baleen whales that lazily swam over our heads. Humans find a kind of a magic in their history that eludesme. I’ve never sat and wondered what life was like before I was activated. I can find it all with a simple search, and most of it doesn’t pertain to me or the science that made me, specifically. I can admire their engineering, I suppose; how they managed to build pyramids, cities, skyscrapers. How they moved from stone to metal across the ages. Yet, that’s simply knowledge, not enchantment.
I pause at the eerily silent café. Aside from the removal of the injured and dead, nothing has been disturbed. A glimpse of moonlight shines through the glass above my head. I home in on little details—twisted rails, the jagged end of a shattered display case, residue from explosive materials, bloodstains where bodies once lay.
A bright glint of light catches my attention. Leaving the crime scene behind, I turn into an exhibit, following the signs in front of me, my footsteps echoing. Ambient noise plays over the sound system—rustling leaves, the singing of birds and insects, a lazy river.
