“Finn!” Troop yelled across the office. “The message center is down again.”
He waited for Finn, a boy on crutches, to hurry over.
“Again?” said Finn. “I thought I just rebooted it twenty minutes ago.”
“Well, it’s not working anymore.”
Troop swiveled around on his chair and showed Finn his electro-slate with a message clearly stating the message center for the Revealers wasn’t functioning. Troop was in charge of sorting the instafications sent to the Revealers into three categories: junk, support and threats. All the junk mail was deleted; the possible threats and new recruitment messages were passed to more senior Revealer members to analyze.
Finn took the electro-slate from Troop and jabbed at the screen. “I’m going to ask Nick if he can increase the memory storage on the message program,” he said.
“He’s been busy lately, so you might want to schedule a meeting ahead of time.”
Finn typed in something onto the electro-slate, nodding absent-mindedly to Troop’s words. “Here,” he said, returning the slate to Troop. “It should be all set…for now at any rate.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.” Finn swung away on his crutches.
Troop returned to sorting the instafications. He still had seven hundred and thirty-five messages to go through before he could take a break from the monotonous task.
“Have you seen Chelsa around?” Finn asked.
“No,” Troop said. He shoveled some fried rice into his mouth, savoring the aroma and taste. “Why do you need her?”
They were seated in the cafeteria; Troop had an hour’s break before he had to return to work. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be given a task as mind numbing as sorting messages; it left him too much time to think—too much time to think about Kristi.
Kristi had disappeared a month ago. No one knew where she went, but Troop knew the chances of her surviving weren’t high. They had been hiding from Searchers and Kristi had gotten separated from him. He’d waited for her to return to their meeting point, but she never came back.
Troop realized Finn was talking and he wasn’t hearing a word he said. “Can you repeat that?”
“You’re still thinking of her, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Troop, it’s time to move on. I know you probably hate me saying that, and trust me, I do too. Kristi is a friend I miss dearly, but it’s been over a month and Kristi still hasn’t shown up. There’s a good possibility that she was found by the Searchers and Sniffers.” Finn spun a spoon in a circle on the tabletop.
“If Kristi was captured by the law enforcers, don’t you think it would be all over the news by now?” countered Troop.
Finn gave a half-hearted shrug and chowed down the rest of his sandwich in record speed. “I have a meeting with Nick in five minutes,” he said.
“No way,” said Troop. “I thought Nick was completely booked for the rest of the week, being the head techie and all that.”
Finn raised his eyebrows. “I have my ways. See you.”
“Later.”
Troop tipped back his chair and thought about the rapid turn of events within the past week. After the break-in at New Genes Lab, the government had tried to place a charge on Troop, Chelsa and Kristi for trespassing on government property. However, after Troop had made a video exposing the behind-the-scenes testing done on Accidents, the government had bigger problems to worry about.
Perfect citizens began to criticize the extremes involved to progress DNA alterations. Even though the mass majority of the population didn’t mind the fact that Accident lives were being sacrificed “for the greater good”, they were still irked that the government had went behind their backs when experimenting on the Accidents.
In the end, the government had dropped charges against the Naturals, partly because the Revealers had hired a reputable lawyer in their defense and partly because the minority of the population that did protest against Accident testing was stirring up enough trouble to keep the law enforcers occupied for a while. Nevertheless, now that things had calmed down, Troop knew the government would use any excuse to arrest the Naturals and Revealers. He had to be careful not to let a toe cross the line.
With half an hour left before he had to report in for his next assignment, Troop decided to trawl the news on his electro-slate. Clicking on the bookmarked sites to the local news, Troop searched for any articles that mentioned a brown-haired, hazel-eyes girl. Stocks, missing droid-dogs, new curfew time for Winchester. Troop read the headlines to himself, thinking, Still nothing about a missing girl.
Feeling disappointed, Troop put his slate to sleep and found his mom, Tiffany Mendax, writing out a contract at her desk. She held up a finger, letting Troop know to allow her to finish her task before speaking. Troop waited until his mom turned off the holographic keyboard before saying, “Anything I can do? I don’t mind doing whatever task there is except for sorting messages again.”
“You can help Chelsa sort through completed cases. She’s upstairs on the fifteenth floor.”
The thought of sorting more stuff wasn’t particularly alluring to Troop, but at least he would have Chelsa for company. “Alright.”
