MINDLYFT (COMPLETE)

CHAPTER 24

Then I realized, just as I approached our nearest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, shining brightly like a lightbulb over my head, that there was another clock wheel moving the Knowles wheel. Dimples.

If I could convince Dimples then she could convince Knowles. And if Knowles was onboard, I had a decent chance of convincing Hinka. Hinka could present our case to the committee in Chicago and the powers that be would alert all the necessary mechanisms to change the terms of the contract, or better yet, throw the whole thing into the vaporizer. Then we'd have free reign to teach Wizard about human imagination. Human creativity. With a creatively thinking World-Wide-Intelligence-Zealot, oh, I give up, couldn't remember the acronym, but whatever it was, super intelligence, on our side - we could solve this problem in a matter of days.

I mean, everything is just a series of ones's and zeros', built on top of another layer of one's and zeros', and so on, like the programming of a computer, or all the little wheel components of a clock. Something was either on or off. Positive or negative. Notched or smooth.

The base layer of our universe was the same. Dots of information telling bigger dots what to do and how to act. If a computerized imagination interface like SphereNet could be altered and even created with a few thousand lines of code changes, then surely so could the universe. And as I saw it, we didn't really need to change anything. We just needed to make a ripple. A small curl as if on the sheet of a bed. Neatly around our little blue and green planet on a three-dimensional plane. Anything coming at us would curve out along that ripple, wrap around to the other side, harmlessly bypassing Earth, on its journey into infinity.

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Convincing Dimples to help me would be no easy task. After all, she was trying to sabotage me, or replace me, or do something that wasn't going to end well for me. There was no other reason for her to have seduced Knowles. Maybe seduced is too strong a word. I'm sure he didn't need to be seduced. Regardless, there was no roundabout way for me to find out. I had to speak with her one on one. Sister to sister. Or maybe it better to think of it as mother to daughter.

I knew she had to come out of the executive offices at least once a day. I'd seen her walking to the lab center and guessed they had her doing something in there. So I went to the MoonBase on Monday, got Knowles and the team squared away on the week's activities, and then waited in the hallway by the executive office entrance.

Luckily the CoffeeBot rolled past every twenty minutes so I had something to do. I wished I had cigarettes to smoke. Those new engineered ones that help eradicate toxins and repair cellular mutations, and all that. Only even those were not allowed on the Moon. Mainly because they increased air-filtering expenses by up to fifteen percent.

When Dimples finally walked out of the office it didn't take her long to recognize me. She kept walking my way. I half expected her to turn around and retreat into the exec office, but I also knew that wasn't her style. To run away from a confrontation. I'd ordered a second cup of coffee from the bot. I held it out to her as a peace offering when she approached. She walked right up to me. Hands on her hips. She wouldn't take the coffee.

"I need to speak with you JeannBerry One," I said.

"That's not my name anymore."

"Ok, well what is your name now?"

"Hara," she said. "My name is Hara."

"Like after the wife of Zeus?"

"What do you want?" She asked stonily.

"We need to talk. About Knowles and Hinka, and a lot of other things. Also, I never got a chance to apologize. Maybe I should start there."

Her expression didn't change. She was waiting for something more. I knew how enraged she must have felt. I too knew what it felt like to be treated as someone's secondary back-up-plan-duplicate. Like a spare closet.