Page 37 of Coldwire
I try to navigate past a couple standing right in the walkway. One girl is hanging off the other’s neck, brushing her nose against her partner’s. Neither notices when I push through, finally reaching Kieren.
“Yes,” he says the moment I meet his eyes. “I ordered you one too.”
“Hopefully not the same thing you got,” I say, peering into his cup before I sit. Kieren likes his coffee black, no sugar, no cream. It’s unimaginable to me.
“I wasn’t born yesterday, Ward.”
Right on cue, a server pushes out from the kitchen, carrying a tray. He’s wearing a headset decorated with a bow, likely to communicate with the bot servers if any of them go astray.
“Table sixteen, you’ve finally got company!” he bellows, grabbing a large cup off his tray and setting it down. “The coffee you preordered for your girlfriend.”
Kieren jolts. His eyes widen, like he’s being accused of a crime. “She is not my girlfriend.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the server hurries to say. He grabs two napkins off his tray, putting them down too. “For your wife.”
Then he’s off before Kieren can make another correction.
I reach for the cup, careful to slide it in front of me without disturbing the enormous mound of whipped cream.
“Am I going to find a ring in here when I drink?” I ask. “I’d rather not choke on a huge diamond.”
Kieren’s fuming. “That’s not funny.”
“Notice how I saidhuge. I’ll have to reject anything less than two carats.”
“Can we get back on topic? What’s this about a talking cat?”
I set the cup down after a sip. There’s likely cream on my top lip, so I take a napkin and pat it away before speaking.
“It’s exactly as I said over chat. It followed me, then opened its mouth and said human words. I can’t imagine that’s legal.”
“It’s not.” Kieren swirls his cup, catching the dregs trying to clump at the bottom. “Or at the very least it doesn’t comply with StrangeLoom’s terms of use.”
“So what was that all about?”
There’s a common saying we have at the academy:If someone seems to have outsmarted NileCorp, it’s probably NileCorp.Insurgency groups that swoop in to steal a prototype; union protests around a new handheld release that grow large enough to draw national scrutiny. Even if the outcome isn’t immediately clear, ten steps later the result will end up benefiting NileCorp somehow.
“Why don’t we ask?”
An invitation enters my display, looping me into an outgoing call. Kieren has Headmaster Murray saved asdad…which seems unnecessarily punctuated. It rings a few times before his father answers, not with a greeting but:
“This is rather fast to have findings already.”
“We’re getting settled,” Kieren says. “Are we being contacted already?”
“Sorry?”
Kieren peers around the café. It’s unlikely anyone is paying attention to us. Even more unlikely that Medaluo could monitor our line, given the hundreds of thousands of calls being made at the same time. Still, we need to be careful. They’ll have automatic sensors imposed, triggered by certain words to listen in for foreign agents.
“Our contact,” Kieren says again. “You said we’d be acting from a contact on the ground. I wanted to check when they would find us.”
A tut comes across the line. “Have you found lodging? Established a workstation?”
“We’re only trying to cover our bases,” I interject. Kieren’s clearly annoying his dad, and it doesn’t help that he didn’t explain why exactly we’re calling. “I suspected we were followed. We wanted to check it wasn’t our contact.”
“No,” Headmaster Murray says. A beat draws long over the line. Maybe it’s some setting in Medaluo, but I can’t hear any noise fillers. When Headmaster Murray doesn’t speak, it’s as though the line isn’t even active. “Once your avatars log a hotel on your tourist visas, the call from your contact on the ground will come in. It’s not a good look that I have to explain this.”
My posture stiffens. Kieren’s mouth hardens into a line.
