Fragment by Paul G Swanson (me reader .txt) 📕

"Right, I'll see what I can do." She, whatever her name was, flicked her long silky black her off over her shoulders. He glanced briefly at her name tag.
"Thanks, Caroline." She looked surprised that he used her name.
"Name tag." She laughed nervously when she saw how close it was to her bosom. She quickly walked off and then turned around remember what he ask her to do. She glanced back up at him as she passed. He heard her say something to them and then the girl yelled at the boy.
"What did I tell you? Stop hitting the chair!"
"But mommy, I'm bored!" The boy argued. The debate raged for almost three minutes before the child broke into tears and screamed, "I'm bored!"
John twisted in his chair and smiled nicely at the boy and his mother. "It's alright, shhh." He looked at the boy and said, "I'm bored too. If it makes you feel better you can use this." He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his cell phone.
He didn't need it anymore, in fact once they left the planet it would absolutely unusable. No more satellites could transmit the signal. "In fact, you can have it, plenty of games on there."
"Really?" The five year old looked up hopefully at him.
"Oh yeah." He and the boy exchanged grins. The mother looked at him doubtfully, she mouthed "Is that really alright?" He nodded in her direction. Just as he started to turn back around he heard the mother whisper something to the boy.
"Thank you!" The boy hollered.
"Oh, your welcome." He expected the mother to show him how to use it, but when the boy hopped down from his seat and sat next to him he knew his chances of scoring with the points with the attendant were shot.
"Can you show me how to play?" John laughed quietly to himself. When he was small he always figured things out for himself, but here was kid determined to be shown how to do it. He was always impartial to kids because they always thought they knew best. But here was a child that was totally the opposite of that stereotype.
"Sure can." He felt the mother gently touch his shoulder trusting. The intercom beeped again and said they would arrive at the colony in three hours time.
For the remainder of the flight he watched the boy play and win card games that he thought were impossible to beat.

"You ok?" Gren asked as he pulled a hard turn. It shook John out of his memories.
"Yeah, it's nothing." He wondered if the maintenance tunnels actually went up from here at all. As far as he could remember he had only been down here once before and when he asked about it they all said the only way up from here is a ladder.
John sat wondering why and how Gren managed to get a vehicle down here. He supposed he could of just built it down here, but that would still leave the question of how it got down here. The frame of the vehicle was far too big to fit down the ladder wells he had seen.
"Hey, Gren?" He asked.
"Yeah what?" Gren pulled another hard right.
"How are we going to get to the surface from here?"
"You'll see." Gren knew that John was curious and he was having fun building the suspense. John thought of the kid on the shuttle and smiled.
"But I wanna know now."
"Crazy man."
"Look who's talking." Gren slammed the brakes and twisted the steering wheel left. The car spun a circle and stopped facing a wall. They had come inches from slamming into it. "Elevator."
"There is an elevator?" No one told him about an elevator, and he had asked specifically about it. Gren pointed to a box a few feet from John. "What?"
"Get out and poke it." John did it, but only because he was so curious as where they would come out. When he went up to the podium he saw up and down arrows. He pressed the proper arrow and the floor lurched. As if it struggling to start, it jumped an inch. It began to slowly rise and he looked up into the darkness. It beckoned a foreboding fate. Out of the floor they rose, a mighty monolith consisting of wires and metal began to reach into the dark sky. The nothing stretched almost infinitely above him.
It was finally starting. His real purpose. This was what he always fantasized about in his daydreams. He grasped the gun he had placed in his pocket when Gren wasn't looking. Secretly he wanted to go, guns blazing, but he knew he had to have an air of calmness about him. It was all about pride and rivalry.

* * *

As the monitor ran statistics by her, she stared in disbelief as the numbers continued changing. Always rising, at first it was a slow process but now five hours later it was jumping at increasing intervals.
As a hacker she regularly scanned through large corporation for easy to access data. This particular database belonged to the colony. It constantly moved location, changed size, and set up new adaptive firewalls. It was almost as if it was self aware.
For every tactic she managed to breach it with, it bounded back in her face with four different ways to keep here out. Completely aware that she was fighting against a great adversary her professional pride prevented her from giving up.
"Just what the hell are you trying to hide?" There was no reason for security as intense as this if they didn't have anything to hide. The four monitors sitting in front of her momentarily blanked out and shot a lewd photograph back at her.
"What the hell?" She thought that would have worked, but just as she thought she broke through it redirected her to a pornographic site. "Damn."
"Zone!" She knew that gruff voice. "I thought you didn't like porn." He laughed. It was her brilliant boyfriend the 'Legendary Computer Killer'.
He had managed to acquire this reputation by breaking into the largest bank in the world and bringing all of its mainframes down by running a single command. He readily admitted to being guilty so his prison sentence was cut short.
It was cut even shorter by the mass evacuation of Earth. He only had another year or two left anyway; and those could have been significantly cut even shorter by good behavior.
She pretended to not know he was standing behind her until he grabbed her breast and squeezed affectionately. She swatted his hand off. "I'm busy." She playfully told him.
"Too busy?" He played his role.
"Depends on what you want to do." She swiveled the chair around and faced him. He helped himself to a few inches of her long legs. She was wearing a tiny black shirt.
Grinning she kissed and felt him push back. Ok, not to busy. The hacking would just have to wait. "I hope this.fits into that criteria," He told her quietly.
"Yep."
She laid there in the sheets smiling. He gotten up and was taking a shower when he started to talk to her, which was unusual for him, normally he sang in off key songs notes when in the shower.
"About that data stream you've been monitoring, what's it been doing lately?" It was sudden so it took her second to answer.
"Well, it's been jumping around erratically as if trying to avoid something, or maybe even find it." She paused. "Why?"
"Just curious."
"In fact just yesterday it even changed its location. Almost like something happened and it had a backup server or something." It had momentarily vanished and then reappeared in nearly the same place. She hadn't known what to make of it.
"Has it counter attacked you yet?"
"What are you talking about? It's just a data stream." He turned the water off quickly.
"Did it or not?" His voice sounded somewhat serious. It in fact had. It was this morning, when it redirected her. The Pc hers was connected to sniffed out an incoming packet and suffered a restart after shutting her down. Some of her data had been corrupted but she powered it back up again anyway.
"Y-yeah. Mathew what's this all about?"
"Get your stuff packed up, quickly!" His tone was strong. She saw his grab the towel and dry off quickly. "Why are you still sitting there? Hurry up!" She still didn't move, he never ordered her around. "There's no time just hurry up, I explain on the way."
"No, explain it now." She told as she stood up. Still nearly naked except for her skirt she felt a draft and shuddered. "Where do you work?"
"I'm an electronic detective. I search the net for certain types of data and report it." He pulled up his pants, "That was a trace. They are coming to get you now. Probably on the way now."
"I don't get it yet." He sighed at her ignorance. Tossing her, the shirt she was wearing and hour ago he began to try and explain.
"The data stream you've been watching for so long, it belongs to an AI."
"Artificial Intelligence? You've got to be kidding me." She almost laughed, the only AI she had ever encountered was that of a videogame, or the sensor in a microwave oven.
"Nope." He grabbed his shirt and slipped it over his head. "We have to go, NOW!" This time she began to get dressed.
"If its AI how can it get at us? It's in the computer right?"
"Not this one."
"How did it get out?"
"It built a mechanical body."
"And now it's going to come after me?"
"Yeah, and its going to want you dead." Suddenly the weight of her own life slapped her in the face.
"Where did it come from? And how do you know about it?" She asked, not expecting him to know everything. What he told her made her jaw hit the floor. The sheer strangeness of it.
"Well," he began, "Its origins are on Earth." She had expected that one, but the next thing he told her was the real shock. "Essentially what gave it the spark of life was," he looked at her