One Woke Up by Lee Gaiteri

Author:Lee Gaiteri [Gaiteri, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-11-15T18:30:00+00:00

The Blackout

I was amazed how quickly I adjusted to having a girlfriend, except that the novelty didn’t show any signs of wearing off. Jenn started sleeping in my bed, and we used hers to watch movies. There was much to like about my new situation, but just having a real person to talk to about what was on my mind—I didn’t count Kate since in a small way she was like me—made a huge difference in the way I felt about the world. That alone was a wonderful feeling. On some deep level, I was sure I had never felt something like that before. Everything about what I felt towards Jenn was new to me.

What still amazed me was that not only had Jenn gotten over her shock about me in a matter of hours, but the new intimacy that brought us was enough to convince her to go ahead and take things further than friendship. Realizing now that she had an interest in me from the beginning, probably much more so once we knew we had so much in common, I was glad that she had discovered what I was first. I would have tried to keep my distance from a relationship otherwise, but sleep deficits had already taken a toll on my judgment. If she had pursued me without knowing the truth, I probably wouldn’t have held out for very long.

We made a token effort to start the game cabinet project on Sunday, but we didn’t actually do much with it until Monday night, when I finally came up with a sketch that suited her. She wanted to build a cabinet partitioned into three sections, each with its own screen, where the ends would support two players and the middle could handle four. I pointed out that she didn’t have controls for eight players, but she told me she knew where to find more. Logistical flaws aside, I liked her plan a lot since it meant there would effectively be three machines to hog instead of just one. I drew up a design that would fit into a corner of the game room, with an access panel at the bottom so an operator could get to the computer inside and manage any wires.

Kate sent me a text on Tuesday. When I called back that evening before joining the guys for cards, she told me she had a hacker friend, Gabe, who was going to be able to help her access documents at Smithfield-Plaxis that were off-limits to her. Her hope was to find out if the Engineers were really involved with SP at all, and if so whether they were using any company equipment. Privately I thought that was unlikely. If I had been one of the Engineers, I would have kept all my files well away from the lab and long since destroyed any evidence that I might have used the company’s resources for such a purpose, meanwhile discreetly sabotaging any experiments that would lead my coworkers closer to the truth.

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