The Horseless Horsemen Trilogy: Boxed Set

The Horseless Horsemen,

Book 1:

Jude

Ross C Miller

Skye Run

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2015 Ross C Miller

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without expressed permission in writing from the publisher.

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Cover image from PublicDomainPicture.net

Cover Design by Ross C Miller

Author’s Warning: This is not a book for children. Circumstances and situations are depicted in detail. Physical and mental violence is graphic.

Second Edition

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 069239575X

ISBN-13: 978-0692395752 (Skye Run)

Prologue

He walked toward the edge of the open ledge, the dried husks of long dead insects crunched under his feet with every shuffling step that he took. He stopped and just stood, looking out over the forest beyond.

He did not consider throwing himself off into the great rock covered expanse below.

He had done that.

…and it had not produced any better results the fourth time.

Most of the loose rock down there was from other … more imaginative …attempts to accomplish the same objective. All of those attempts had failed.

Miserably.

Or, put more accurately, he had become even more miserable because of their failure. …increasingly so with every subsequent failed attempt. He had taxed his own creativity trying to end his own existence. All to no avail.

Instead of ceasing his existence, which he had found was impossible … to date, anyway … he had ceased trying to attempt his own destruction. He had ceased to worry about those failures. He had other things to worry about now, like … being hunted. But he did not worry for himself. He had already proven that he could not be killed, much less harmed. No, he worried for those that hunted him. For … not about.

As he stood there, he did not worry about the authorities who always searched for him. They had found him once. They had caught him that once. …more or less.

He had simply walked away.

They could not hold him. He had shown them that. Thankfully, he did not have to harm anyone in the process.

They knew he came here. They might even know that he was right here, right now. Maybe they would try to catch him again.

Maybe not.

He did not know. He did not care. It would not really matter if they did catch him, again. He had shown them that they could not harm him or keep him. He had made that very clear.

Maybe they had learned.

Maybe they would give up trying to catch him.

He doubted it.

He would have sighed his weariness, if he could have. …and if he had the luxury of becoming weary.

He stood on the ledge facing the setting sun. The second breath he might have sighed would not have been for the view. It would not have been for the warmth or comfort of the sun.

He did not feel the sun’s warmth on his skin. Not now. Not even in the middle of a southern summer’s day. He did not feel the warmth any more than he felt the cold on a New England deep winter’s night.

He would not have sighed for the oranges and yellows surrounding the glowing orb. …or the pale greens where the bright yellows of the sun merged into the deep blues of the evening sky. He was not sure that his vision functioned the same way as normal people’s vision did. What he saw, in a horribly over-simplified nutshell, was more of a projection on the back of his mind put there by the front of his mind.

…without the intervention of his eyes.

He had no eyes.

He was not even sure that he saw the same things as normal people saw them. He knew what colors were supposed to be, but he was not sure that color entered into the equation of what served for his sight at all.

He knew what was supposed to be blue or yellow, but he could not say confidently that what he saw was what either of those colors actually looked like. It was more like … a knowing. He had never seen colors before. But he knew. That was all. He just knew, as he just knew a lot of things.

He did not spend any time trying to figure out the process of his seeing or hearing. He had wasted far too much time on that long ago. He had not come to any kind of a definite conclusion. But it did not matter. What he had that served as sight and hearing was more than functionally useful.

He used to have eyes. …and ears. He knew he had. He must have, at one time. He must have had them because at some time in the past he had been human. …before he had become … this. But he had not had eyes or ears for a very long time. He had not had them for as long as he could remember. His entire life.

He had lost his eyes and ears. He had lost them at the same time as he had lost everything else.

He had also lost his appreciation for the colors of the sunset, along with the flaming reds, oranges and yellows of the New England autumn maple and oak trees. …at just about the same time as he had lost his eyes, he had concluded. He could not remember appreciating those colors any more than he could remember ever having eyes and ears.

Maybe the lack of appreciation had to do with the way that he saw things.

Maybe it just had to do with having lost his eyes.

And his lips.

And his voice.

And his lungs.

The list went on.

Maybe his lack of appreciation had to do with that list, that … far too long list. Maybe it just had to do with the fact that the list existed in the first place.

He knew that people grew angry and bitter when their bodies betrayed them. He knew that people grew bitter about getting old. They grew bitter about not being able to look as young as they thought their minds were. …bitter about brittle bones. …bitter about having to be so careful about not falling and breaking parts of themselves.

But he was not bitter about any of those things. His body had not failed him. It would not. It could not. Ever. …as far as he could tell. It had not so far, anyway. There was no reason to believe that would change at any time in the foreseeable future, and his future was foreseeable for a very long time.

Not that he could see into the future. His future was hidden just as much as everyone else’s was. But he knew that his future would be the same as his present. His present was the same as his past.

He had gotten over all of the anger about that, too.

He had gotten over all of the anger about never having to worry about a heart attack, a brain aneurism, liver failure, Alzheimer’s, or cancer. …especially cancer. He had gotten over the anger about never having to worry about broken bones, muscle sprains, getting a cold, sneezing, or being tired. He had gotten over the anger about never having a hangnail or a rogue eyelash. He had gotten over the anger about never having to pee at an inconvenient time. …about never having to trim his toenails. …about not having to choose which socks he was going to wear.

He used to be normal. He used to be a person, a respectful and respectable person. He had a wife and two more than halfway decent kids. He had a good job and a bright future to look forward to, or … so he had been told. He had the normal everyday problems and annoyances that normal everyday people had.

But it had all been taken away.

All of it.

Gone.

He had gotten past the anger of all of that, too. …having everything taken away from him. His possessions. His family. Everything that he could possibly have cared about had all been taken away. …even his memory of ever having had any of them.

Completely gone. Irretrievably.

He would never get anything back. He would never be able to be near his wife or kids. …even if he had known who they were.

It was all just gone.

He had gotten past all the anger of all his innumerable losses. …even the loss of his life.

Not a figurative loss of his life.

No. …not an identity theft. …although, a good argument could be made for that.

He had lost his life. He had died. He was dead. …sort of. His body and mind had been lifeless. They had declared him dead. They had a funeral for him, and buried him.

He was not sure how long he had been dead. …he had been … well … dead. But it was long enough. More than just a little while, anyway. He did not remember. He did not remember anything before he had started thinking.

He was told he had been dead for about a year.

He had been a man. But he did not remember being that man. He had no connection to the living being he had once been before. He did not know who he had been, or what he had done.

He particularly did not know what he had done to deserve this.

He had not been a monster. He had not been a bad person. He had not even been apathetic, as most people seem to be. He had been given a few facts. …all the facts he had wanted, and more. He had not really wanted any. But he got some anyway. Just a few. …the few facts that could possibly have mattered …the few facts that might have been able to make him feel better. …feel better about being dead. …and not. …possibly.

Not a werewolf.

That did not even begin to enter into the equation. At least he would have been able to function as human being most of the time.

Not the half existence of a zombie.

That concept was laughable. He would have laughed if he could have. …except that it was not actually all that funny.

Not the needful existence of a vampire. That was another non-humorous funny concept. He needed nothing from his physical surroundings. …not food, nor water, nor air. …certainly not darkness, blood or home soil to rest on.

Not the miniscule existence of a ghost. It would have been a relief to be reduced to a single animated mindless want.

He would have been better off as any of those four things. …except that those things did not actually exist in reality. They only existed in fiction designed to scare children or thrill young adults.

…except that he was all four of those things combined.

…kind of.

He was as alive as any werewolf could be, and he shared their torment. His body was the body of the long dead. His mind had far more than the limited functionality of the living dead. And he had only one want. …one single want.

…to just be completely dead.

That was all. That was the sum total of everything that he wanted. But it was a state over which he had no control.

His body was dead, but mobile. His mind was completely active and forever trapped in this insufferable monstrous body.

He just wanted to have an end to this miserable existence.

But he was not likely to be completely dead any time in the foreseeable future. He had things to do. He had so many things to do. He would not be completely dead, he believed, until he finished all of those things. Then, after that, he believed … he hoped … he would finally be allowed to rest in peace.

But it did not look like that day would be any time soon.

He had … so very many things to do.

He knew that it was commonly said, we will laugh about this someday.

He died a long time ago. He did not find it any more amusing now than he had then. He had not found a reason to be amused about that. He had not found sufficient reason to be amused about anything else yet, either.

It was not likely that he ever would.

The sun dropped quickly down below the tree line. The sky began to reflect his mood.

*****

Part One

Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals. I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder,

Come.

- Revelations 6:1

I: The End

Race you, he said quietly, challenging Justice, with his hand wrapped around the mouthpiece of his headset. The observers may have heard it anyway, even with the sound system geared to filter out the background noise. Doing what they were doing, though, there wasn’t much chance anything either one of them said might remain completely private.

Justice refused to call him Bob or, most particularly, Pollux like the rest of the company did. He just looked at Robert blankly for a few seconds without answering the quiet challenge, and then continued to guide his RCMPR at a steady deliberate pace. The console in front of him had two joysticks, one for each track, and two rows of toggle switches. Each switch was paired with a small trackball. The console also had a number dials, gauges, readouts, and a very large computer screen showing a half a dozen different and tiled views fed from the video ports on his robot, along with a single view from Robert’s. There were even foot controls cabled into the consoles, and a pair of heavily wired virtual Waldo gloves that could be slipped into quickly for controlling the appendages, which needed finer, more subtle, movement controls.

Occasionally Justice spoke short commands to his robot, which were picked up by the small microphone that sat close to his mouth. Spoken instructions were preceded by the phrase tech-one, which would alert his robot that a vocal command was about to be given. Robert’s alert phrase to his own robot was tech-two. Without the alert phrase spoken, a normal conversation could be had, or running progress commentary could be given without interfering with the function sequence of the robots. The programming team had inserted a recognition sequence that would allow Robert’s robot to answer to Pollux, as well. Justice never used the alternate name that was available for himself.

Everything on the console was clearly labeled and easily readable, according to all the ISO standards, which required the console to be that much bigger just to accommodate those labels. But, even though the crew made sure that the labels were always pristine, nobody actually ever looked at any of them anymore. Justice knew the console, and could have effectively driven his robot with the control panel completely hidden from his vision, as long as he could still see the screens.

That was the main purpose of these exercises.

The multi-purpose robots needed to be fully functioning extensions of their drivers, and vice versa. Even though he had designed the robots … and the consoles and controls … Justice still had to complete the transition from the robot and control console being theory … a part of his mind and just objects in front of him … to becoming essentially the same as his arms, hands, legs, feet, eyes, and ears. That was also why Justice was the team lead. No one knew the robots and their functional capabilities, along with their limitations, better than he did.

The other reason for the exercises … not the most important, but the most definitive reason in retaining the need for the exercises and keeping Justice in the lead position on the team … was that Robert was … a hot dog.

Robert was more into the bling and flash than the best and most efficient and effective way to accomplish the goals set by the mission parameters. On the other hand, Robert did exhibit a superior aptitude for controlling the RCMPR, and was very good at understanding the capabilities of the robots and making decisions based on those capabilities without having to sit and think about it for longer than efficiency required.

The upside was that Robert could easily accomplish most of the exercises, by himself, quite adequately. The downside was that sometimes Robert went off in an unexpected independent direction, taking pre-emptive actions that weren’t necessarily … optimal.

TeslaRobotics Incorporated specialized in the design, fabrication and sale of the mission-parameter-programmable, remote-controlled robots for a wide variety of specific applications. Their most highly profitable business, though, was the renting out of the services of those robots and their human counterpart teams.

Although the robot sales were a significant part of TRI’s business, those sales were only to companies and government organizations that were going to have a long-term use for those robots’ specific capabilities, and which could invest the funds necessary to train permanent employees to drive them. Due to those very learning curves and training costs, if the need for the robot wasn’t both permanent and frequent, then TeslaRobotics was normally contracted to send in their teams, usually into potentially hostile environments. The robots could gather a plethora of video and audio data, along with taking physical samples of their surroundings and physically manipulating objects.

More often than not, the answers were needed sooner than it would take to organize the training of the people to run any newly purchased bots.

Owning the robots outright was far more cost effective in the long run, though, because all of TRI’s robots had lifetime maintenance contracts, the charges of which were limited to the reimbursement of TRI employee expenses for travel and any replacement parts required. Unless a robot had been seriously damaged, all the diagnostics could be performed remotely, so the TRI person could arrive prepared, and any repairs needed, along with all of the maintenance, could be done on site, locally. Should those problems not be remotely diagnosable, or if the robot needed more than someone could do onsite, then the robot would be shipped back to TRI for whatever work needed to be done.

TRI’s robots had been used in every kind of situation from entering apartments found or suspected of being heavily booby-trapped to exploring recently active volcano craters and the accompanying vents. They had been sent in to newly found caves and sink holes. TRI even had a line for undersea exploration. Some of their underwater robots had been sent in to explore sections of the Titanic and other, more entrenched, sunken seagoing vessels.

While some situations were simple enough that privately owned robots could be used with judicious care, some situations were complicated enough that the robots needed to be driven by highly trained specialists. Justice and Robert were the primary team of those specialists for the missions not involving undersea exploration, which was the much higher percentage of missions requiring the rentals.

A clever someone … someone who’d had a sense of humor and far too much free time on her hands … had unofficially christened the RCMPRs Castor and Pollux. And then she had started referring to Justice and Robert by the names she had given the bots they drove; Justice being Castor, and Robert being Pollux. It didn’t take long for the names to stick throughout the company; something Robert seemed to enjoy far more than Justice did. Justice had hoped it was just a fad for which the novelty would wear off quickly. It hadn’t.

Most of TRI’s land-bound robots were run on a high-powered battery, which, while not quite being perpetually charged, would recharge itself using solar energy, some of its own battery power, and a small generator driven by friction with the track drive axles. The power generated externally would then be shunted through a series of condensers and proprietary chips, which increased the power output back to its own batteries. TRI’s original products were early versions of these batteries before they had expanded into, and then focused on, the robotics exploration industry.

Under normal use and conditions, if the RCMPR was in direct sunlight, then the batteries could stay charged for quite an extended period. If the robot just sat and did nothing but observe, and then periodically transmitted those observations, its batteries could, theoretically, stay charged forever, and even recharge those batteries to full power over an extended period if it managed somehow to drain them. Sitting around would have defeated the purpose of most of the robots, however, for anything other than exploration of something that might be best studied in that fashion. …like the moon (for which TRI’s earliest models were used) or Mars.

In any event, Castor and Pollux remained charged while active for far longer than it took to complete all of the real life missions that they had been used in, and almost all of the tasks the testing scenario team had dreamed up to date. The one failed test scenario had led to a design modification that allowed two batteries to be connected and used while recharging a third. The power that was drawn from or put back into the batteries was automatically monitored and divertible between the batteries on the fly, so that there was always one battery receiving the lion’s share of the recharging.

The robots had a number of appendages that were normally kept stored, folded in close to their body, useful for grasping, lifting, and even moving objects far heavier than the robots themselves, using adjustable fulcrums attached to those appendages. They had arrays of lasers that could be used for cutting anything from paper to bank vault doors, and even carried explosive charges for strategic and logistic problems that could best be solved that way.

All in all, TRI’s robots could do just about anything that a human could, in many cases far more quickly and safely. The drivers normally sat in a climate-controlled room watching the robot’s progress on a number of monitors, which were given live feed by several swivel controlled cameras that could provide a simultaneous 360-degree view, both laterally and vertically.

The current scenario presented Justice and Robert with a ditch they needed to get past before they could get into the building on the other side. Justice and Robert could already see a few options for exploring the outside of the building, which they would have to do before they tried to go in. It was an urban booby trap scenario, and the goal was to get into the building without setting off the explosives inside, or allowing them to go off by themselves. The assumption was, until disproven, that there were people inside who could be killed if the explosion happened. The people were just crash dummies, and the explosives were just a spring-loaded flag, but the point was real enough.

Before they could do any exploration of the building, they had to get across the ditch. It was too steep and too wide to cross without creating some form of ramp or bridge. The drive tracks’ extender wheels could be unlocked. Along with shifting the RCMPRs center of gravity, and with using the appendages to approximate ski poles for stability, the tracks could revolve most of the way around the drive wheels, which made the robots capable of handling terrain more irregular than normally would be found. A field piled high with boulders might slow the RCMPRs progress, might even halt it for a while, but it wouldn’t stop them completely for long, which left a wide range of options open for solving this particular problem.

Justice wasn’t sure what the scenario guys had in mind with this, though. Road potholes weren’t normally that big, and the more frequent obstruction would be cars parked on the side of the road. They must have something else planned as part of the puzzle.

There were trees in the area, but while they weren’t small trees, they wouldn’t be useful in getting across the ditch without taking a lot of time to cut them up to fill the gap. He could send his robot along the ditch until he found a place that could be crossed, but that would take time. …time to get there, and then more time to return, if there wasn’t a suitable crossing spot nearby. Under that consideration, he’d be right back here with the same decision to make, with the same possible outcome, in the opposite direction. In this type of mission, time was always a factor. Explosives inside the building could already be on a countdown. He decided that this was only an obstacle designed to delay them outright, and that they needed to get across quickly. That cut the number of their available options rather significantly.

Justice had his robot drop two explosive charges, of which both robots carried about a dozen, into the ditch after activating the electronic detonator receivers. Since all the detonators for all the charges were keyed to the same code, he could add as many charges to the pack as he needed. Once the code was entered, all the activated charges would go off at the same time. Since the ditch had no solid walls … just dirt, not concrete … just the two charges should be enough to achieve his purpose.

Justice rolled his robot back, until he had the ditch at what he judged to be a safe distance, and started to key in the code sequence.

The monitor bank in front of Justice flashed and went black with a short painful squeal in his headphones.

Justice yanked his headphones off as the feedback from the overhead speakers finished echoing off the walls of the large room. His eyes were shut tight, his chin lowered and almost set on his right shoulder in a pained expression.

When he looked up, one eye at a time and with his ears still ringing, half the large screens on the wall twenty feet past the rail on the other side of the consoles were all blank. The screens should have shown all of the same views that Justice should have had on his own monitors to anyone observing from upstairs.

The wall speakers wired in to Robert’s console had relayed a loud snap, and then a crash.

All Justice’s gauges and readouts sat at zero.

Oops, Robert whispered, softly enough that if he hadn’t had his microphone still active, Justice would have been the only one able to hear it.

Justice squeezed his eyes shut again, knowing full well what was coming next. He sat back in his chair with his hands in his lap.

After a quick flip of the Action Hold toggle switch to put his bot in a dormant status, Robert put his elbows up on his console. With his face in his hands, he rubbed his forehead with his fingertips.

There was about two full seconds of silence while they waited for the other shoe to fall.

And fall it did.

…loudly enough to echo through the suddenly and completely silent mission control room, where everyone else knew what was coming, as well.

WHAT IN THE HELL WAS THAT GOAT-ROPE?!

To say that the voice yelling from the observation floor, above and behind Justice and Robert, wasn’t exactly happy would have been a gross understatement. Both Justice and Robert knew what goat-rope meant. They’d both heard it before from The Captain, and it wasn’t anything that either one of them particularly wanted to be placed in the same sentence with.

A metal door slammed from where the voice had come from. The loud echo of the door answered across the big open mission room, and hard-soled shoes pounded quickly down a metal staircase.

Once the mission started, Justice had complete control of what the robot team did to accomplish the goals. Observers … usually government officials of one branch or from one country or another if TRI was running a sales demo … would sit outside The Captain’s office along the deck above while the Vice President of Sales made his pitch. This was the main reason Justice and Robert wore their headsets, to limit the background noise and conversations so they could concentrate on what they were supposed to be doing. Lacking other outsider observers, The Captain always monitored the test exercises progress.

The Captain came around their tandem consoles to face them both. His face was almost as red as the tie that hung loose around his open light blue collar. He slammed his hands down on the tops of their monitor backs. The stations were set so that Justice and Robert were seated on the outside of a V so that they wouldn’t be distracted by the other’s monitors. The Captain stood in the center of the V, and looked like he was just about ready to wring someone’s neck, or worse. …which, not very coincidentally, he was.

He backed into … Robert began.

"ONE MORE WORD AND YOU’LL BOTH BE HOUSE-MOUSES FOR THE REST OF YOUR NATURAL BORN LIVES! DO NOT MAKE ME ANY MORE HIGH AND RIGHT THAN I ALREADY AM!"

Robert very wisely reconsidered the value of finishing his sentence, and quickly calculated that value well past the point of diminishing returns. His teeth clicked as he quickly closed his mouth.

The Captain took three deep breaths, and closed his eyes for a moment. He turned slightly and pointed at the wall behind him, towards the bank of blank screens that were supposed to be showing Justice’s view, and said with slightly less volume, THAT, gentlemen, was twenty-three million dollars that just got turned to scrap! And THAT would be your combined salaries, AND mine, for a very long time! The Captain looked at Robert. What. In. Hell. Were you doing felling a tree? he asked with a glare.

The first question was always bad. Not necessarily the question itself, but to whom it was asked. If you were asked the first question, then you were the one in the deepest amount of trouble. You did not want to be the one the first question was directed at if you had any choice in the matter. Making sure you didn’t screw up was, technically, a choice.

To fill the trench so we could cross, sir, Robert said crisply. He had the sense not to go the but you said not to say another word route. That would not have been a good choice. One employee had tried it a long time ago. She had been a don’t mess with me feminist who had taken her cause just a little farther than common sense should have suggested. She had spent the short subsequent time until she found a new job working in TRI’s mailroom. No one since had been stupid enough to re-explore that particular territory.

When new employees came in, some of the ones who had been at TRI for a good while usually gave the noobs a general quick and private rundown of all the Might Want To and Might Not Want To’s. Shut your mouth when The Captain tells you to, was at the very top of the Might Want To list. Getting flippant with The Captain, was right at the very top of the Might Not Want To list.

The Captain turned to face Justice. "And what were you doing not paying attention to your partner?"

The second question was only moderately better than the first. If one person was asked both, then, well, you really didn’t want to be that person for approximately the next two weeks, at least not in the office. After those two weeks, you probably ought to have a new job already.

I failed to inform Robert that I was about to create a passage with explosives, sir. It’s my fault. Justice decided to skip the question asked, and go straight to the end of the matter. It would be better for everyone in the company in the long run just to throw himself onto his own sword and take the brunt, rather than let The Captain build up a good head of steam. Justice suspected Robert’s next week would have been likely to turn out to be far more pleasant if Robert had taken that path to begin with.

On the other hand, it really was Justice’s fault. He was the team lead.

"You’re damn right, it’s your fault! You’re the team leader, and it’s your job to know what the hell your team is doing! You’re suspended two weeks without pay!"

Yep. There it was. That should put a sufficient punctuation mark on the end of the conversation.

Yes, sir. Justice shut his equipment off calmly. Thank you, sir.

He didn’t argue. It could have been far worse. He could have been fired. And it would have been justified. It had been his job to know what Robert was doing. …and to let Robert know what Justice was doing, too. It hadn’t been the first time Robert had taken actions on his own, and he should have been paying better attention to Robert while he was trying to put together the puzzle of the mission.

Conversely, Justice had just been sent home; time which he could make very good use of for the company on furthering his new robotic designs for the projects coming up. …which made it highly unlikely that he would ever get fired, unless he somehow managed to screw up to the point of crash’n’burn. It would take far too long to replace him effectively. It took a long time before designs could be effectively tested, and both the designs and the designer to be proven reliable. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t always looking for an addition to the design and the mission operations staffs. Contingency planning was a very large part of TRI’s success. Justice knew how to run a mission very successfully, but the challenge of robot design was his primary love. … second only to Anne and the kids.

Justice would likely be paid for his time, since he was going to work, anyway. The Captain was tough but fair, and knew his assets. He also knew how to make rewards initially seem like punishments, how to make punishments initially seem like rewards; and when, on whom, and to what limits, he could use those tactics successfully for the greatest benefit to the team that was the company, TeslaRobotics.

Robert was still in the office. …with The Captain. He would be for the next two weeks, and he would find himself a constant reminder to The Captain about a certain twenty-three million dollar item. Subsequently, The Captain would be that very same reminder to Robert. All in all, Justice felt he had the far better deal between the two of them. In fact, he wouldn’t have traded places with Robert for the next two weeks for an entire year’s bonuses.

Justice stood and left the mission control theater without a change of expression or sideways glance. His manner was carefully neutral and unhurried. There was nothing he could do about the robot, or the situation. What would be would be, and all he could do was move forward. Forward was exactly where he intended to go. …with at least some of the rest of the projects that he was working on.

The control theater was at the end of a long hallway, which was lined with large offices for the various production and design teams. The layout of this part of the building was primarily organized to show the most impressive sections of the process, as part of the Sales Team Tour, in the most efficient manner possible. Stairways led off the hall to upper floors where the admin and logistics teams had their offices.

Justice passed a long hallway that branched off to the right, which led to the first stage metal-works and assembly sections. The hallway to the left led to another number of the design offices. He took the left turn and went to the seventh office on the left, at the end of the hall. The Captain had initially wanted him to take the first office, and be part of the sales tour, but had put him farther down the hall when they had started getting the contracts for the more highly classified government robots … the new spy drone upgrades … on which Justice occasionally had to do hardware debugging.

He touched his ID card to the scanner and opened the door while the scanner still buzzed. The light in the office went on as he entered, being heat sensor activated.

Justice collapsed into his webbed chair, and allowed himself a few seconds to relax before he shut down the laptop on his desk. It took a few seconds before all four of the screens went dark. He popped the laptop off its base, and slid it into his briefcase. Even though all the files were automatically backed up every few minutes, the original files all permanently resided on the laptops as their primary location. The design team didn’t have online access to work from any other location offsite, or even keeping those files on the main server, because of proprietary information security. …which seemed like an oxymoron if he was taking the files out of the building. If he was going to do any work at home, though, he had to have the files.

Anything accessible from the internet was fair game for hackers, particularly files from businesses like TRI. So anyone on the design team that wasn’t trusted enough to occasionally work from home was the real oxymoron. …if they weren’t trusted that much, they didn’t work for TRI.

After another few seconds to collect his thoughts and make sure that his expectations concerning his work files for the next three hours were in place correctly, Justice got up and left. His office door would lock itself behind him, and the light would turn itself off in fifteen seconds. He went back down the hallway and took the left toward the exit. …the last door on the right before the exit was the locker room.

None of the lockers had locks on the doors, because the company’s security measures included the random inspection of the lockers. Nothing in TRI’s history had ever come up missing from those lockers, although notices had been posted on two lockers shortly after the policy had been instituted that a few particular items had been confiscated, and would have to be retrieved from the Security Office. …and in the presence of The Captain. Neither one of those employees had returned the next day.

Justice opened his locker, and took his windbreaker from it. All jackets and outdoor gear were to enter no farther into the building than the locker room. The windbreaker was the only thing he’d brought this morning. Leaving the locker room, he loosened his tie and undid the top two buttons of his shirt as he approached the last security door before leaving the building. He pulled his ID card to the extent of the spring-loaded reel that he kept clipped to his belt, and waved it at the scanner to unlock the exit door.

The employee time clock, which entered comings and goings both into the payroll and security systems, was next to the scanner. Seven fifty-three pm showed on its digital display. His shoulders slumped.

Dinner. Crap. Time flies when you’re having fun.

The two metal and glass three-quarter-sized double doors slid open smoothly, and he went through. They slid shut quickly behind him.

The evening air that struck him in the face as he left was hot, but only relatively, because the air conditioning was set at sixty-four degrees inside the building, mostly for the benefit of all of the communications and computer equipment. Justice pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, turned it on and slid it open.

Call home, he said at the phone before he had gotten half way across the parking lot.

He heard it ring twice, and then it was answered by his wife, who already knew what was about to be said.

Hey. Just left. Sorry. He paused. Yes, ma’am.

He slid his phone shut with his thumb, and, putting it in his pants pocket, traded the phone for the car remote. He pushed the button on the remote that unlocked his driver door, hit the next button to start the car, and got in.

Anne hadn’t been angry. This had happened plenty of times before, and Justice sitting down to dinner without the kids at the table had always been the consequence. The kids didn’t care for it any more than Anne, but they were teenagers, and there was some unwritten but widely understood rule somewhere that forbade them to actually allow anyone to suspect that they noticed his absence. Anne, however, was completely free of that rule and could show that his staying late bothered her, yet she always refrained from doing so. Anne understood very well the job that Justice had, and most of what was required of him. Sometimes things had gone far into the night when they were getting ready to run a sales demo, or if the team was headed out to some remote location the next day. Compared to those nights, Justice had gotten out quite early, this time.

The building he had just left was large. During the day, the windows were sunscreen darkened. The rear of the building could have been a factory for just about anything. Mostly, it was non-descript.

The landscaping was kept up neatly, and a tall chain-link fence surrounded the front grounds. Another taller fence enclosed a two and a half-hundred square acre area behind the building, which was used only as a testing ground for the robots. Both fences were electrified, and had signs stating so every eight feet. There was a twelve-foot open space between the electrified fence and the six-foot outer fence. Thirty feet separated the electrified fence from the outer rim of trees inside the enclosed area. The trees were dense for about fifty feet, but from there most of the area inward was a no-man’s land of mazes, ditches, sparse … if not broken … trees, and odd empty cement block buildings of various sizes and shapes. A ten-acre, man-made pond sat off to one side, used mostly as a home for frogs and mosquitoes and testing waterproof robot casings and motors.

Justice backed out of his assigned parking space and turned to leave the lot. The single lanes in each direction in and out of the lot had a number of security measures built into the pavement. One would have thought, knowing all those measures, that the building might have housed a maximum-security prison. Because the robotics business was extremely lucrative, the competition was ruthless and corporate espionage was occasionally engaged in.

…not by TRI.

Security was a major concern since the robots were built and tested here, from the large ones … like the ones Justice and Robert drove … which were about half the size of a three-wheeled motorcycle, down to the ones not much bigger than a shoe. The services provided by them brought in an amount of money every year that could have financed an entire third world country for a few months. Since some of the contracts that TRI had were of a sensitive nature, it wasn’t as if they wanted to let anyone walk away with anything classified, hardware or otherwise.

Justice stopped at the gate, rolled down his window, and waved to the night guard who had come out of the small station as he was driving up. The guard came up to the side of Justice’s car.

Why you’re still married is beyond me, Castor. Even the security personnel had adopted the nicknames for Justice and Robert.

Occasionally, Tommy, it puzzles me, too. I must have some redeeming value, ‘cause she keeps letting me back into the house, Justice answered deprecatingly. How about your wife? How’s she doing with that bite? Was it a brown recluse after all?

Everyone was important from his or her own perspective, and Justice treated everyone in a way that didn’t dispute that notion. He always made it a point to ask and then put in the effort to remember.

Justice and Tommy lapsed into a short conversation. It had indeed been a brown recluse, and had required intensive allergy and antibiotic therapy so that the site of the bite wouldn’t be eaten away by the spider’s venom. They talked until they noticed another set of headlights approaching from the parking lot.

Tommy reached around the doorframe of the shack, and pushed the button that caused the gate to lift. He waved and said, G’nite, Castor!

Good night, Tommy! Glad your wife came out okay! Justice waved and drove out onto the private road as the gate closed behind him.

TeslaRobotics was at the end of the road, and owned the nearer one of the two miles of property to the main road. He pulled onto the congested main road and spent the next hour and a half going only fifteen miles. Even though the construction was done at night, the missing lane still made traffic back up for miles.

At least rush hour is almost over, and not just beginning.

He had considered commuting by bicycle on a regular basis. He would still have to use his car on rainy or snowy days, though, which would have made the commute much like going into the hot air after having the air conditioning set too low, and that, quite literally, was something he had to deal with most days as it was.

Commuters in the expanded D.C. suburbs weren’t exactly all that considerate towards cyclists, either.

*****

The conversation with Anne about his suspension went pretty much as he expected. She wasn’t happy, but she was supportive. He still had his job, after all, and would for the foreseeable future. She sat with him, nursing a glass of wine, as he ate his dinner. Anne had eaten earlier with Jaynie and Ryan, who had run through the kitchen a few minutes ago on their way to their rooms, a mumbled Hi, Dad drifting on the air behind them. Anne had kept his dinner warm for him, and as he ate everything that he had on his plate, they traded happenings of the day.

Justice had started with, Well. Would you like the good news or the bad news first?

Um, lemme guess. Anne crossed her arms, then reached up to tap the side of her jaw repeatedly, and looked up and to the side thoughtfully and slightly overacting her part. You got a promotion? That could probably have covered both the good and bad news at the same time.

No, ma’am.

The Captain decided to retire?

That’s not really any different from your first guess.

One of your robots bit your leg, and you had to put it down? Anne continued guessing hopefully.

He pulled up the cuffs of his pants to show his hairy shins. Sorry. Wrong again.

Nice legs, she commented.

You’ve had too much wine, he said with a lopsided smile, pushing his pant legs back down.

You wish, Anne retorted.

Well … yeah, he agreed with a goofy smile.

Gimme a while, Anne chuckled, too. So, what’s the bad news? She took another sip of wine.

Two week suspension, the tone on the last syllable lowered sadly.

Hmm, she frowned slightly. What’s the good news?

Two week suspension, he said happily with a stupid grin.

Sweet! her eyebrows went up, and her face brightened. But don’t come help me at the shop, she added warily.

Wouldn’t dream of it, Justice agreed, entirely understanding the reason for her last statement.

They laughed.

Justice told Anne about the training run, and how it had ended.

What happened with Robert? Anne asked with concern.

He’s Justice drew out the answer for dramatic effect, …going to have to spend the next two weeks with The Captain.

Oh, no, she said with a low tone of impending doom.

Then the conversation turned to her shop. Her catering business was gaining enough regular daily clients that she’d had to hire two people, a part-time confectioner and a part-time lunch prepper, both having the possibility of converting to full time as her business grew even more, which she expected would happen within the next half year. That made the total two full-timers … in addition to herself … and ten part-timers, including these two new employees for her in all. That resulted in its own organizational problems, requiring further research and deliberations on choices of solutions that included workman’s comp considerations … posted procedures and literature, and what would or would not be allowed by the state inspectors and other local and state agencies … other benefits that may or may not apply, and the additional insurance considerations. Some of the people she had in other part time positions would have to take on supervisory and training duties, as well, in the next few days. She started to explain at length. …until she saw Justice’s eyes start to glaze over like some of the donuts her people delivered until midmorning.

She laughed.

Anne knew very well that the eye glaze wasn’t because he wasn’t interested. On the contrary, he was very interested, but on some subjects, even as brilliant as Justice was, she might as well have been speaking a foreign language. Conversely, as interested as she was in the things he did and could do, she had no clue once he got two variables into the first layer of calculations on the tensile strength of titanium-carbon fiber composite alloys, or the size of a pivot joint that would be used in levering … well… She cared. It was just that there was very little that he could say which she could repeat with any degree of accuracy, and he might as well have been talking about quantum physics. …which he attempted to do occasionally, and she couldn’t really tell if he was actually joking or not when he did.

For his part, Justice thought that it was phenomenal that his wife could not only run a business, but have that business be her own, and figure out where all the holes were in her knowledge about running that business as it expanded. …and then find all the information she needed to fill those holes. He was far more than certain that, at best, he might rate as high as Miserable Failure with the organizational aspect of running any kind of business. As far as the cooking went, he would probably poison someone … or worse … and end up in jail for crimes deemed so heinous as to earn him a life sentence in solitary confinement, if not immediate execution with no hope of appeal or repeal. The phrase Epic Fail most immediately came to mind. Anne even refused his offers to help in the kitchen before meals, which allowed him to be late up until dinnertime before his presence was even considered welcome.

…which … might possibly have had something to do with the amount of garlic he put in the pot of Loosianne … she always intentionally mangled the word … Gumbo the last time he had tried to help her. Coincidentally … it had also been the first time he had tried to help her.

Even though it was something he wasn’t required to remember at this point, one clove meant just one piece torn from the bunch, not the entire head. Peeled was important, too, because the dry skins would not cook, as she had subsequently very gently explained to him as she tried to spoon out all the pieces. And diced or pressed. …not the full and intact cloves. Leaving them intact had made it easier to find all the pieces, but it didn’t exactly help his case. She did allow him, however, to help with the dishes and with putting leftovers in the fridge, and he was far more than happy to do those few things that he actually felt competent enough to do. He knew that it would still be a very long time before he sufficiently made up for the Garlic Apocalypse, though. …even though Anne had forgiven him way back then.

Justice’s expertise ran along a different vein. He understood mathematics applied to mechanics, and the problem solving thereof. He designed robots to accomplish stated goals or procedures, intuitively anticipating the majority of the problems and obstacles that might arise, and compensating for those problems or obstacles with modifications to the theoretical design before he ever put pen to paper or a line on the screen in the 3D design software.

TRI had their own IT department, which had written the software he used. After working with it for a few months when he had first started his job there, Justice had handed them descriptions of additional subroutines, which he had designed to enable him to do some of the things that he couldn’t do because of the limitations of the program. The changes had been approved, and given to the software engineers to accomplish. When all the subroutines had been written and installed, they had found that the entire software set speed was so degraded that they had to go back and rewrite the entire application from square one. Upon the completion of that project, though, they had a design software package … including a few more subroutines that Justice had developed in the meantime … that the sale of which could have financed a complete transition to research and development, without having to manufacture any of the robots at all. But, since their main business was the robots, and most of the company employees … including The Captain … dealt with those far better than they were able to deal with outside people, it was decided that the software would remain solely proprietary.

Along with the Castor and Pollux remote controlled multi-purpose robots, Justice had also designed one of TRI’s nine robots for different underwater uses. He’d had a major amount of input on one of the most popular military drones. And there were two more sets of robots he was already working on for different functions, including the NASA JUICE mission … JUpiter’s ICy moon Explorer … for which TeslaRobotics had been contracted. The mission was scheduled to launch in 2022. …if NASA survived the current presidential administration. Theoretically, after a successful liftoff, the Ariane Five transport module would take eleven years to reach Ganymede after passing and circling both Io and Europa.

The initial proposal had been to study the three moons from orbit, leaving orbital observation units at Io, Europa, and Ganymede. The revised and approved proposal included landing a pair of TRI’s programmed robots on the surface of Ganymede for the initial onsite exploration. Robots on the ground of Ganymede could acquire far more detailed information than could be gleaned from orbit about the saltwater ocean suspected to be sandwiched between layers of ice about one-hundred twenty-five miles below the moon’s surface.

When the endeavor was initially discussed, the people at NASA had been enthusiastic enough to project that it would initiate a massive effort toward global employment, requiring a permanent moon base as a waypoint for eventual terra-forming and possible colonization of both the Earth’s moon and Ganymede.

Ganymede had a liquid iron core. But, more importantly, it also had an atmosphere … trace as it might be … that was oxygen. That core and trace atmosphere would allow Jupiter’s moon to be converted relatively easily, once they got to that point, into something more supportive to the tools of humanity. It would be far easier than converting Io’s sulfur dioxide atmosphere and three-point-six thousand-rem radiation intake, Venus’ clouds of sulphuric acid, or Mars’ surface of fine dust and carbon dioxide atmosphere. Ganymede could then become a stepping stone to somewhere outside the solar system, if someplace suitable was discovered, as it was far easier and far safer to slingshot out from around Jupiter from Ganymede than it was to do the same around the Sun from Earth.

Anne affectionately called him her Geek-Meister and sometimes teased him when the normal world confused him, as it very often did.

Justice had never been sports-minded when he was young. He was always one of the last kids picked for teams in phys ed, even though he was quick and nimble in touch football, or could analyze the opposite team in volleyball and find the best weak spot to consistently serve the ball. He was strong and light for his size, which wasn’t exactly small back then, but not particularly all that big, either.

You would have thought that he would have been a good pick in phys ed. It wasn’t his physical performance that held him back, though, but the sports themselves. …and any strategy they might require having more than a single active person at any given point in time. He just never could figure out how to be part of a sports team. Team sports were very important to the kids he had grown up with, so he was normally just dismissed as inept. Subsequently he never played any of the after school sports in high school or college, and spent his time with his nose in his books, graduating a very calculated third in his high school class to preserve his inconspicuousness.

Justice had gone into the Navy after high school, to get benefits that would help him pay for college. …which he had needed, considering he had subsequently been accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Justice had gotten simultaneous Bachelor’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, taking summer courses and carrying a full time job the entire time, again graduating a very calculated and inconspicuous third in his class. From there he had gotten more grants and loans and pursued Masters Degrees in both courses.

In the process of pursuing his education, Justice had just never learned to cook. It took too much time, and far more often than not ended up with the smoke detectors announcing his failures to the neighbors. But he was very good at managing his money, so he had been able to go to a little diner that he had found which maintained a good balance between price and quality.

It was at that diner Justice had met Anne.

Anne’s parents ran the diner. She and her five brothers and sisters took turns at the cooking, cleaning, bussing, and waiting.

After two years of seeing him come, order, eat, and leave, and catching him watching her but never actually saying anything to her, Anne had decided that she was just going to have to take that first step. She had sat down at his corner booth … the one he normally sat at, either because he just liked being in that corner, or knew that it was almost always in the area she took care of, or both … without the invitation she had decided that he would never manage to forward, when he came in. She began the conversation running through