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Byzantine Institute, Albuquerque, NM
Phen-T112 watched his lizard run back and forth across the hall, clearly confused. This was the floor where Rayen, Tony and Gabby were last seen before they disappeared.
Giving a command Phen had programmed into the sentient beast, it began morphing from a lizard to the image of a hunting dog called a bloodhound that Phen had seen in a book.
These people still had books with paper pages.
Talk about primitive.
When the dog finished forming, he started sniffing just like the one Phen had read about. Now, would he have a nose for finding Rayen and her two friends?
The Browns might give Phen grief over a dog, but he could always order it to morph back into a lizard when they weren’t looking. They thought they were so clever running this school under the noses of the government in this world. How difficult could it be to develop a school and be accepted as a superior operation when the people running it had been sent back 175 years in time?
Not Mrs. Brown, of course. Or her son, Nicholas. Mr. Brown must have adopted the kid since Brown hadn’t been in the past long enough to have a seventeen-year-old child.
SEOH didn’t place women in any vital position. He had less use for women than he did for MystiKs.
Or scouts.
Phen had never enjoyed being a TecKnati scout, but he’d been moving up the ranks until that stupid Rayen showed up in the Sphere. SEOH held Phen responsible for the intruders.
Twenty-three years as a TecKnati, fifteen of which had been spent either training or working as a scout, and he got sent back to a time when paper and physical computers were still in use.
No more.
TecKnati had served the civilization back home by providing solar energy to heat and cool homes, laser curtains to prevent rabid C’raydonians from entering the cities, and a space program that offered a defense system unlike anything ever seen before.
That was all fine, but Phen had been treated as a number for too long. SEOH thought he’d never see Phen again, but he was wrong. Phen would find that time travel computer and wait for Rayen to return then make her show him how to get out of this place.
He wanted to go home. Something this place would never be.
The sound of voices echoing from the adjacent hallway snapped Phen out of his musings. He needed to hide. He hurried forward to where the dog had stopped, sniffing at a door. Phen opened it and rushed inside the dark room with the dog at his side, closing the door softly.
“I don’t like waiting.” Phen recognized the voice as Dr. Maxwell’s, because it was rough and sounded as if the man gargled with broken glass. “SEOH leaves us exposed by sitting on all these MystiK eggs we’ve harvested in the women’s center. We’ve been here four years. It’s time to move to the next location and get started.”
“Based on the message Phen brought from SEOH, we may not have to continue any operation much longer.”
And that would be Mr. Brown, the central cog in all this. He’d tried to get Phen to take classes, to fit in with the other students in the school. Phen had given him the thousand-yard stare he saved for idiots.
Take antiquated classes? He’d probably have to use a pencil and paper, too.
Did they still have pencils in this era?
Phen should find some of the USB memory sticks and take them with him to sell when he returned home. There was always someone who wanted to collect old crap.
SEOH’s minions really thought Phen was going to just accept being ripped from everything he knew and thrown back in time?
“Speaking of Phen,” Dr. Maxwell said as the voices came closer to the room where Phen hid. “What are we going to do about him?”
“Let him be. The minute SEOH sends the K-Virus back in time, we’ll release it into the atmosphere. The virus will begin attacking anyone not inoculated. SEOH specified that we should inoculate ancestors of only the top twenty percent of TecKnati DNA based on intellect, plus the eight families protecting future engineers. Do you really think Phen came from that level of breeding stock?”
Dr. Maxwell chuckled and Phen considered turning his sentient beast into something with claws and serrated teeth to unleash on the obnoxious doctor.
So SEOH was even going to wipe out his own people?
“I hope his plan works,” Dr. Maxwell said.
“We’ll know in another day when the virus shows up. Once we see the first cases being reported on the news, it will be time to move to the next phase of this operation. We’ll use—” Mr. Brown’s voice trailed off as they turned down another hall.
Phen swung around and leaned back against the door. He had to find that computer now and he’d take it to a spot where he could hold Rayen prisoner as soon as she came back through the portal.
She would either help him or watch her friends die.
When his eyes adjusted to the semi-dark room, he stared at where the dog sat beside a ladder, with two commercial-size cans of tomatoes sitting on the floor at its base. Then he looked up at the top of the shelf.
