Scorpion by Christian Cantrell (novel24 .txt) 📕

daughter’s lucky she grew out of it. If I were to add up all the time I spent playing Pokémon, I could have probably gotten another degree.”

Quinn starts to say something, but stops. Instead, she says, “So where do you sit?”

“I work off-site.”

“Oh. Where?”

Henrietta looks uncomfortable. “With Mr. Moretti.”

“Got it,” Quinn says. “The top secret project.”

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault. What did you do before that?”

“I worked with Mr. Moretti on the Epoch Index.”

Quinn’s eyebrows go up. “Really? The Epoch Index? The message picked up by the Large Hadron Collider?”

“That’s the one.”

“Are you allowed to talk about it?”

“There isn’t much to say. We never figured it out.”

“Didn’t the guy who discovered it claim it was some kind of message from the future?”

Henrietta resets her oversized specs, which promptly slip right back down into the little dents on either side of her nose, then daintily raises a hand. “Actually, that was me.”

“You discovered the Epoch Index?”

“Well, technically it was discovered by an AI. But I’m the one who trained the neural network to identify anomalous data.”

“What did the message say?”

“We don’t know. It was encrypted.”

“Do you really think it was from the future?”

“That part was exaggerated. There was a theory that it was caused by quantum resonance from a parallel universe, but obviously there’s no way to prove that.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it was a pretty standard encrypted transmission that was accidentally picked up by a faulty sensor.”

“Are we still trying to decrypt it?”

“We don’t have it anymore. All the evidence was sealed.”

Quinn looks skeptical. “You’re telling me that the CIA found something it couldn’t explain and didn’t secretly keep a copy?”

Henrietta checks the installation progress. “You’d have to ask Mr. Moretti about that.”

“How in the world did you go from working at the Large Hadron Collider to being Moretti’s tech guy?”

“That’s a very long story.”

“Is there a short version?”

Henrietta makes a face as she thinks it over. “Let’s just say that you never know what the world has in store for you.”

“Amen to that,” Quinn says. “Last week I was downstairs trying to catch nuclear terrorists. Now I’m about to get on a plane and start chasing an international serial killer.”

“You were on the Nuclear Terrorism Nonproliferation Task Force?”

“Right up to the end.”

Henrietta’s almond eyes slowly close for a solemn, prolonged moment.

“Are you OK?”

When she opens them again, she blinks several times, and Quinn can see that she is doing her best to remain composed.

“I’m fine,” she says. “I just want to thank you.”

“I wish I could take some credit,” Quinn says. “All we did was spend five years proving there are no nuclear threats left.”

“I know, but…that matters.”

Quinn smiles. “Thank you for saying that.”

The progress bar completes and Quinn’s phone reboots.

“Anyway,” Henrietta says, “you’re all set, Ms. Mitchell.”

Quinn looks down at her handset. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. The app is installed along with all the required certificates. And I generated new encryption keys for you while I was at it. I also installed public keys for Ms. Townes, Mr. Moretti, and myself, so you can contact us securely anytime.”

“Perfect.”

Henrietta stands and drops her phone back into the pocket of her dress. “Anything else?”

“I don’t think so.” Quinn offers her hand. “It was nice meeting you, Henrietta.”

The girl enthusiastically accepts Quinn’s gesture. “You too, Ms. Mitchell.”

She rolls her chair right back into the carpet divots from which it was originally lifted, as though concealing evidence of her presence, then starts toward the elevators.

“Henrietta?” Quinn says.

The girl stops.

“This secret project you’re working on. Can you tell me if it has anything to do with the Epoch Index?”

“No.”

“No, it doesn’t? Or no, you can’t tell me?”

“Safe travels, Ms. Mitchell,” says the girl, and her polka-dot dress twirls with her effervescent turn.

9

  MIMICRY

CHANGE IN PLANS.

Ranveer remains so uninspired by what lies ahead that he has rented a private studio at Yoga’ubdi on the outskirts of Sohar so he can spend the morning meditating on it. It took some finessing, and some administrative rejiggering motivated by a small stack of Omani rial notes, but he was able to secure a bright and airy second-story room for himself with a balcony that opens out onto both the serene blue-green Gulf of Oman as well as the small adjacent parking lot below so that his subconscious can keep track of any comings and goings. Nine times out of ten, too many car doors slamming in rapid staccato succession means either that some form of an assault is imminent, or that a statistically significant number of civilians have suddenly been given very good reason to flee uncommonly rapidly. The key to walking out of either situation alive is early detection.

Although he grew up in Iran, where any religion other than Islam barely registers as a rounding error, Ranveer was raised a closet Hindu, and while he no longer claims adherence to any form of organized religion, yoga and meditation have remained part of his constitution as a cultural vestige. Perhaps it is because, when forced into Muslim prayer five times a day for the first half of his life by the incessant calls to worship broadcast from mosque minarets more ubiquitous in Tehran than coffee shops in Seattle, he did his best to antagonize Allah by secretly meditating instead. To most people, meditation is a form of peaceful, spiritual grounding; to Ranveer, it is an act of pure defiance.

But yoga is different. To old-school Hindus, yoga means creepily limber old people with gnarled feet in loose-fitting tunics. This is a far cry from the Western interpretation that, having no natural predators, flourished among Californians before invading the rest of North America and Western Europe, rapidly evolving toward a state where it is synonymous with form-fitting, designer-branded, synthetic-fiber ensembles that have given rise to all-new subgenres of bizarre erotic fetishes. As far as Ranveer is concerned, the cure for yoga perversion is simple: a monthlong retreat led by a two-hundred-year-old guru with yak cheese and snot in his beard in the bitter frigidity of the