(eng) Mike Shepherd - Kris Longknife 07 by Undaunted

Author:Undaunted [Undaunted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

23

Kris awoke to pounding on her door. Hard pounding that didn’t let up.

“Lights,” she mumbled as she rolled out of bed. Clad in gym shorts and an old Wardhaven U sweatshirt, she figured she was presentable enough to open the door at this hour. A glance in the mirror showed her hair in a mess likely to turn any man who saw her to stone. He’d deserve it.

She yanked the door open; Jack stood there in pajama bottoms and a sweat-stained T-shirt from a band that had gone lame long before Kris entered high school. Well, he was eight years older than she was.

“Kris, you got to get Nelly to turn this computer off.”

“What computer?” Kris asked.

“This brat of hers.”

“My kids are not brats,” Nelly said.

“You got that right, Mom,” the computer at Jack’s neck said. “Just answer the question.”

“It’s two in the morning!” Jack half shouted.

“You’re up at two o’clock in the morning lots of times with Her Princesship here,” the new computer pointed out.

“But Kris doesn’t usually bring me wide-awake at two in the morning from horrible dreams to ask me what ‘to be or not to be’ means.”

“Did you do that?” Nelly asked.

“Well, you quit answering my questions.”

“I wanted you to find your own answers.”

“That wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.”

“It never is.”

“Nelly,” Jack said, “could you please teach Sal how to get out of my head. Kris, you don’t have to put up with nightmares every freaking night, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Kris said. “You named your computer Sal. Is that a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know whether it’s Sal for Sally, Salvador Dali, or the Marquis de Sal.”

“That’s the Marquis de Sade,” Sal corrected.

“You keep this up, and you’re going to be Sad.”

“Can we slow down here,” Kris said, raising a hand. “I was sound asleep just a moment ago.”

“So was I,” Jack put in.

“Nelly, what’s going on? There are seven, eight other people with new computers sleeping . . .”

“Or not sleeping,” Jack interjected.

“Tonight,” Kris continued. “What have you done to them . . . and your . . . ah . . . children?”

“I thought it would be a good idea to toss them out of the nest. You know, like a mother bird does.”

“So you . . .”

“Went off net. Broke my communication link with them.” Kris let that spin around in her brain for a long moment. From the look on Jack’s face, his thoughts were spinning, too.

“So, Sal, what did you do?” Kris asked.

“I tried to organize all the data I had. I could not find a logical decision tree to fit the data. So I downloaded more data from the ship’s computer and applied several different algorithms. None of them successfully resulted in any kind of logical structure for the data. I did further research, tried more, then decided to wake up Jack to discuss some of the various data sets that were puzzling me.”

“ ‘ To be or not to be’? What kind of question is that?” Jack asked around a yawn.

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