Undercover - Steam Power - Book 5

Part 19 - Oppy has gone

After I had eaten the desert, I wandered back to the dining room with Kozak just as Beryl was saying, 'All those in favour of the motion to monitor the activities of the global warming motorcycle gang, say aye.'

All the guerilla grannies said, 'aye' and Beryl said the motion was carried and then accepted a motion to adjourn the meeting for refreshments. Whereupon most of the grannies moved to the kitchen for cake and some of Rico's wine.

Kozak was already into the wine. He stopped me. 'Ze motorcyclists! zhey are trying to stop Dr Zhang's work.' 

 Curious, I followed Beryl until she had a glass of wine in her hand when I asked about the global warming biker gang. She laughed and told me that she had unable to sleep and had gone for a walk at three in the morning. When she passed Silverwood School, she saw a motor bike in the parking lot with the driver inspecting a video display built into a large pannier on the back of the bike.

'At first I thought it was your hunky friends Triple Oh and Theo but when I got closer the guy saw me and flipped the display off.'

(Triple Oh was a Time Bureau agent who normally was Shakespeare's bodyguard but who had been assigned to protect me from Murga, the wanted time criminal who had abducted my parents.)

Beryl had asked the man what he was doing up so early in the morning and he had told her he studying the ground level concentration of CO2 connection with global warming.

'When I asked if it was bad here, he told me it was about normal, although Ottawa has little industry and most of the electricity was hydro-power, generated by the Ottawa river.'

'I told him we had a lot of trees that absorbed most of the hot air, containing carbon dioxide, generated by the members of Parliament but, just then another biker drove up and told us they had to leave.'

'Now, I was wearing my head lamp at the time and they didn't know that it concealed video camera, so I got good shots of their faces and their bikes and later I compared their Chinese faces with the those of the kidnapping crew. Guess what?'

'You got a match?''Yeah. The bikers were on the Dark Fire Data bus.'

I groaned. 'That didn't take them long. We had better tell Dr Zhang and Denny.' 

I was back in school very early the next morning despite it being a weekend. I was anxious to tell Denny and Dr Zhang about the bikers and I found Denny at his desk staring at a monitor screen and looking very worried.

He looked around and said, 'Take a look at this.'

I looked, but it didn't make much sense. The screen was covered with numbers. 

 'Oppy has gone,' he groaned. 'She's reverted to kindergarten arithmetic. Two plus two equals four. Four plus four equals eight . . .' 

He was interrupted as the speakers suddenly came to life with a song.

'A B C D   E F G   H I J K   LMNO P . . . now I know my ABC next time won't you sing with me.'

'There!' Denny sighed, 'Oppy sounds like a three year old who just learned half the alphabet . . . Our super, artificially intelligent, computer has left us . . . What am I going to tell Lee Zhang?'