Connected Infection

22. Paradigm Shift - Chapter 14.1

14

GASP, Mongolia

Wednesday, July 19th 2028

08:33 (UTC+8)

Anna yawned as she entered the cafeteria. Deciding she would be woefully ill-equipped for conversation before the day's caffeine fix, she went straight for the coffee machine, where she nevertheless found herself joined by Roy Shvedov.

'Morning,' he said breezily. 'I see you remembered your ID this time.'

'Yeah,' she yawned again. 'I stapled it to my chest before I went to bed.'

'Wouldn't it have been easier to staple it to your blouse?'

'Yes, but what if I forgot to wear the right blouse?'

'You could have slept in it?'

Anna shrugged. 'Next time.'

Roy laughed. 'Ah, Anna. You need an authoritarian boyfriend in your life. Someone to organise your life and make sure you remember to eat properly.'

'If he was happy to cook, I'd be happy to eat,' Anna said.

Roy shook his head. 'You bachelorettes. You're all too skinny. The next time my mother visits I'll bring you some of her stroganoff surprise.'

'What's the surprise?'

'She hides a firecracker in it.'

'What?'

'I am joking, of course. The surprise is actually vodka. Whenever my family uses the word surprise, they mean vodka.'

'Are you still joking?'

Roy grinned. 'Anything you can cook with wine, you can cook with vodka. Have you got a new phone yet?' he asked.

'A phone? Oh, a phone,' Anna said, and remembered she wasn't supposed to know about the gifts. 'Oh. No. What?'

Roy pointed at a group of the Kali staff surrounding a table with a large box of the new phones from the Chinese on it. 'Go get yourself one. They're free.'

'Free? Anna said, and they wandered across to join the cluster of other employees.

'Hey, Anna,' one of them greeted her. 'Have a phone. Hell, have two. Nobody will know.'

Anna smiled. 'I don't think I could use more than one at a time,' she said as she picked one of the devices.

'I've already got one of these,' an Australian woman from the Zephyr project was grumbling. 'It cost me a fortune. And now they're giving them away for free! I wish they were giving us SLOBs instead.'

'Hey, those things are shit,' someone else said. 'My wife had one and it stopped working.'

'Yeah, that happened to me,' another worker said. 'I had to go back to my old phone. I can get rid of the thing now.'

Anna smiled politely and made her way back out of the group as more people drifted in, talking about the Chinese and the implications of their funding of the new Kali experiment; politically, functionally, economically and generally.

'How was Khongi's dinosaur friend?' Roy asked her. 'I couldn't make it. My wife made plans for me.'

'She was interesting,' Anna said, slipping the phone into her bag. 'I had no idea the Gobi had so many fossils. Her samples were very impressive, and she said she would organise a trip for us to go out to the Flaming Cliffs with her.'

'I would like to see them too,' he nodded. 'I have liked dinosaurs since I was a boy. My favourite dinosaur is iguanodon, because of its pointy thumbs.'