Unearthly by Rebecca Bloomer

Author:Rebecca Bloomer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: YA Sci-fi
Publisher: Odyssey Books
Published: 2017-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Akari was waiting for them. Unlike Amos, who’d kept his Earthen clothing tendencies intact, Akari was wearing Anphobosite white. It suited him, really … the white against his Asian skin tone, the loose flowing fabric against a body that stayed almost constantly tense. Flattering and flawless, disgusting really, that he never looked less than put together.

‘So, you boys do what you do, and just let us do what we do, okay?’

Akari made a greeting nod. ‘You have all the news so far?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yup.’

They answered together, pinky fingers still entwined.

‘Excellent.’ Amos rubbed his hands together. ‘Everybody’s informed, let’s get to work.’

Jodi and Astrid eyed the packages on their desks. ‘Don’t you guys have somewhere else to be?’ Jodi couldn’t keep the irritation from her voice. ‘Shouldn’t you be figuring out why the gobsnocker bleeds green? I mean really, really, bright green? Could it be any more Hollywood?’

Akari bobbed his head. ‘You may be correct, but observation of the alien’s behaviour will help us deduce their source.’

Jodi and Astrid both ‘hmmmed’.

‘What he’s saying,’ Amos offered, ‘is that by watching the little fella, we might be able to work backward from what he does to why he does it. I mean, we know that neural networks affect reflexes and reflex speed, right? So if we watch how these guys function, we might be able to deduce some biology.’

‘I understood what he said,’ Astrid spoke very quietly. ‘I was simply deciding whether or not I agreed.’

Oh, yeah. Jodi had to restrain her happy little fist-pump. That shut him right up.

When Astrid inserted the first of the small chips that passed for a hard drive on Anphobos, she watched her screen and smiled when the first layers of encoding appeared. Jodi just loved when Astrid played hardball.

‘We’ll start at the beginning and work our way through to the end. We’ll start looking at exactly what we provided, the programming and the processes. We’ll observe design and structural integrity. We will observe only the observable. When we are finished with that, you may make whatever deductions you wish.’

Jodi gnawed on the inside of her bottom lip and tried not to smile. And when she was bad, she was horrid. To her relief, the code began to scroll. Her mind flowed with it. For her, reading this kind of text was so much easier than reading books and certainly easier than reading people. This was simple. Action and consequence. Beneath that code were layers of diagrams and schematics, weird trees that detailed decision making processes. She didn’t need the diagrams, though, because she’d drawn them; they were in her head. The code was the key.

She fell in, swam around, and felt herself relax for the first time in days. In this universe, if you gave the right instruction, you got the right response. Simple and perfect. Too perfect.

‘It’s all fine.’ Jodi rubbed her eyes as she spoke. Hours had passed with barely more than a muttered word between her and Astrid. They’d flipped screens, changed disks, altered views, and nothing had changed.

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