July 30 - Night 0010
Aug. 1st, 2011 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolFlynn almost hoped the Buick wouldn't start. But it did, so Flynn rolled all the windows down and headed for the interstate. He hated endlessly rolling the windows up and down, but they had to be down while he was driving or he'd cook, and they had to be up while parked or the dust would get into everything. Also, there had been that one event with the snake. How it had gotten inside the Buick was a mystery that Flynn figured he'd never solve.
He drove through Negrito, where he usually shopped, and also Sparling and Chiapas. He turned off on the state road and headed towards the river. Flynn drove for the better part of thirty miles, with the countryside growing ever more desolate. There was nothing out this way but bits of grass trying desperately to keep the dust from blowing away – trying, and not succeeding. This part of Texas was no good for farming, not much better for ranching, and therefore smart people basically left it alone. Except for Rutt, who apparently had chosen to live out in this wasteland.
Flynn drove through a bowl in the ground, around a stand of mesquite, and then he saw it. Flynn blinked several times, not entirely sure what he was seeing.
A fence surrounded a bright green hill – a hill covered with thick lawn, and fruit trees in neat rows, and endless beds of flowers in artistically arranged patterns. Sprinklers sprayed several swimming pools per minute over the entire thing, and a small army of Hispanic men creeped over the thing, raking and weeding and tending.
Behind it all stood the house. It was a plantation-style monstrosity, with high gabled roofs and a widow's watch and a porch that ran all the way around. A decomposed granite drive wound up the hill and came to rest before a magnificent entryway, with baroque glass doors that must have been twelve feet tall. The entire thing reeked of ostentation and new money.
The gates of the fence were standing open as Flynn rolled up the drive. A wrought iron archway passed over Flynn; he craned his neck out the window to look at it. The lettering read: THE WHITE HOUSE.
"Jesus," muttered Flynn.
As Flynn pulled up in front of the huge house, an electric cart with two men in it looped around the far corner. The passenger got out. It was Rutt dressed in golf whites, grinning from ear to ear.
"Flynn my boy!" said Rutt, seizing Flynn by the shoulder as he pumped his hand. Rutt's real name was Rutherford Cullen, but nobody called him anything other than Rutt, or sometimes The Rutt. Once he had gotten into a fistfight with an acquaintance who had made the error of calling him by his first name, and not in a mocking way either. Rutt's temper was legendary.
"So glad you could swing by for supper," said Rutt, his eyes sparkling. He was in his fifties, with hard arms and legs but a big round belly. He had wispy blonde hair that he kept under a gimme cap, and an almost white mustache that framed his mouth in three sides of a square and made Rutt look a bit like Hulk Hogan.
"Beats mac and cheese," said Flynn, as they walked up the front steps. He jerked a thumb at the three-story edifice rising above them. "Moving up in the world, huh?" he said.
Rutt waggled his eyebrows. "Oh, you noticed, did you?" he teased. "Yeah, it's one hell of a story, I tell you what." Apparently the lower half of the front door was the only part that hinged; Rutt held it open for Flynn.
Flynn found himself in a cool green hall with an elegant stair swooping up to the levels above. He copied Rutt in wiping his feet on the mat. "I had just gone into Arroyo to pick up a new rifle," said Rutt. "Me and the missus stopped at the Roadside Sav'r to get some jerky and beers, and I just got a wild hair to buy a Super Lotto ticket. Now, you know I can't stand that stuff; my Momma threw her money away for years buying those things and never once won nothing. Well, this time I said, what the hell, I'm getting one!"
"And I told him to Ultra-Ply it!" interrupted a woman descending the stairs. She was in her forties, with frosted blonde hair in a neat perm, and she was wearing a pale lavender pantsuit that hadn't been the mode since the seventies.
"I was just getting to that, Colleen," said Rutt, putting his arms around the woman and kissing her on the top of the head. "Walter Flynn, please meet my sweetheart wife, Colleen Cullen."
"I like a name that goes together," said Colleen brightly.
"Call me Flynn, Ma'am," said Flynn, taking her hand.
"Well, Flynn, turns out we won that Super Lotto jackpot," said Colleen. "It had gone two months in twelve states and nobody had won it, and then we got the winning ticket!"
"All on our lonesome, too," added Rutt, upset that his story had been hijacked. "Two hundred and forty million dollars, just for us! How about that shit?" He slapped Flynn on the back.
"Minus taxes, I guess," said Flynn.
Rutt waved that off. "Shoot, I got my lawyers working on that," he said. "But never mind." Rutt took Colleen by the shoulders. "Sweet Biscuit," he said seriously, "me and Flynn got some business with the others, so you'll have to excuse us now."
"It was real nice meeting you," said Colleen. "You'll be staying for supper, I'm sure."
"Yes, Ma'am," answered Flynn. Rutt guided him away and through some glass doors.
The next room was awe-inspiring. It was a glassed-in solarium, full of banana plants and palm trees and hanging bromeliads. Whisper-quiet ceiling fans blew one way and hidden air conditioning vents blew the other, making the entire space cool and comfortable even on the sunniest day. There was wicker furniture and a tiled-in bar, and the room had a commanding view of the river. The hill sloped all the way down to it; from the house's vantage, you could see clear across to Mexico, with a panoramic view for miles around of both countries. The sun was sinking and reflecting off the waters of the Rio Grande. It was a beautiful, peaceful scene.
There were four other men in the room, all drinking Miller Lites. Rutt threw Flynn a beer out of an ice chest in the middle of the room. Flynn was glad to see that even though Rutt now had a quarter of a billion dollars, he still wasn't a fancy beer man.
"Everybody, this is Flynn," said Rutt. "Flynn, this is the rest of my crew on the little project I'm pulling together. I guess you remember Ernest? We've run together for a while now."
Flynn remembered. Ernest Simpson was over sixty-five and whip-thin. He was a man who lived to hate people, but the people he hated seemed to vary week by week. Ernest had run with Rutt's militia, and apparently he was still on the gravy train now that Rutt had made it big. Ernest scowled at Flynn.
"Why'd you bring this low-life on board anyhow?" complained Ernest. He looked Flynn up and down and made it plain that he didn't like what he saw. "He ain't nothing special."
Rutt slapped the back of Ernest's head. Ernest's hat flew off, and he had to bend to retrieve it. Rutt waggled a finger at his buddy.
"You shut it," said Rutt. "I'll tell you what's special about Flynn. He's the only one who's got actual combat flight experience. Hey, have you got any of that, Gus? Tubbs? How about you, Slate?" The man with the mirror sunglasses looked like he had something to say, but Rutt headed him off.
"I mean in an actual military," he said. Slate shut up. Rutt rounded on Ernest, who had meekly replaced his hat.
"Now I *know* you don't have no experience with nothing, except for a little crop dusting, so you best be quiet," said Rutt. He put a hand on Flynn's shoulder. "This boy here flew Blackhawks in Iraq. Proud to serve his country, my boy was. And when some damned rag-head shot a SAM into his helicopter, he got himself out of the wreck even with a jacked-up leg." Rutt looked at Flynn with a great deal of respect. Flynn was just embarrassed, especially since he knew his head was a lot worse off than the leg, even with the pin in his ankle.
"Look," interrupted Flynn, "I don't know the first thing about what you've got going on, Rutt. Why don't you fill me in?"
"You bet. You bet I will," said Rutt, nodding vigorously. He crossed to the big windows that looked out over the river and pointed out across the water.
"Every year," said Rutt, "a shit-ton of Mexicans cross forty miles of desert, wade that river, and cross another thirty miles on this side to get to the Interstate. They do it knowing it's against the law, but they don't give a shit and they do it anyway. America's drowning in illegals. In Sparling County alone, the sheriff estimates that last year over two thousand Mexicans crossed illegally. Two thousand! That's like a giant cruise ship full of illegals pulled up and docked in my back yard down there, and they all came piling out, filling out schools and our hospital beds, stealing jobs, doing crimes, and just generally being parasites. It ain't right!"
Rutt's audience nodded appreciatively. This wasn't anything any of them hadn't heard a hundred times before.
"Well, now we're gonna take the fight to them," said Rutt, slapping a fist into an open palm. "We are under attack by a hostile invading army, and anybody who doesn't see it that way is just plain blind. It's our duty as Americans to defend the sacred soil of this nation. Unfortunately, our own government wants to tie our hands behind our backs, and make it so a man can't even protect what's his! So, we've got to do it the sneaky way. Fortunately, the Good Lord provides. Finally we've got the means to strike the Mexicans while they're out there in the wasteland. We fly in, kill or scatter the invaders, and fly back out before anybody knows what's happened."
"Whoa whoa whoa," interrupted Flynn. "Look, hey Rutt, thanks for having me over, but I think I see where this is going, and I don't like it. Even if I was okay with flying out there and shooting up illegal aliens – and I'm definitely not saying anything like that – I'm not even sure I would be any good to you anymore at the stick of a helicopter."
Rutt shared a private smile with the other men. "Oh, not a helicopter, Flynn," he said. "A drone."
Flynn frowned. "A what?"
"Come check out the fleet," said Rutt. As a couple of the others opened the sliding glass doors that led out onto the back porch, Rutt went to a line of metal suitcases. Five of them were black and one of them was chrome. Rutt picked the shiny case and lugged it out the doors. The rest of the group tagged along as they walked across the porch and down the slope of the hill towards the river.
"I bought 'em off a friend in the CIA," said Rutt. "Drones were gonna become the new way of waging war in Afghanistan a couple of years ago, you know. We were gonna replace men on the ground with sophisticated remote-operated craft that could do everything a soldier could do, only better, and without risking American lives. But the missile drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan pissed off our allies with all the collateral damage, so they fell out of favor. These prototypes were ready to go, but the military couldn't deploy them. So, they sold 'em to me at a pretty good discount. Didn't even ask what I was going to do with them. Threw in the remote operation stations in the bargain." He slapped the side of his suitcase.
On a newly poured tarmac, Flynn could see five black forms lined up neatly near a refueling station. They looked like small helicopters; each was the size of a motorcycle. They had two rotors, left and right, with a stabilization tail and a spindly pair of landing legs. There was a cluster of sensors up front, and a series of tubes hung below. Naturally, there was no cockpit.
"These ain't missile drones," said Rutt proudly. "These are close combat drones, designed to bring the fight to the Taleban in the high country. They pack twin high-powered rifles firing NATO 5.56mm ammunition, and they can drop a high explosive pack too. They have excellent optics and audio gear – parabolic mic, night vision, thermo scan, telescopic times fifty – the works. They also have almost no radar signature and the rotors are stealthed. These are the Vigilant series, and I want you to fly one. I want you to go bust some Coyote tail."
Flynn pointed at a sixth object parked off to the side. It was dull grey, about twice the size of the Vigilants, and looked like a cross between a UFO and a rotary saw blade. Rutt grinned even wider.
"That's my special baby, my Cheshire Cat," said Rutt proudly. "She's the only one of her kind. I get to fly her. Just you watch." The chrome suitcase had legs that folded down, and when Rutt opened the lid he had a stand-up remote control workstation, complete with joysticks, monitors and fire control.
Rutt pressed some buttons, and some of the blades on the Cheshire Cat began to spin around in one direction. Other blades on the top and bottom began to spin in the other direction. Since the drone was basically all blades, except for sensor and weapon clusters on the top and bottom, it was soon one big blur.
"You know how you can't see a helicopter prop when it's up to speed?" shouted Rutt over the whine of the drone's rotors. "Well, when you don't have a person in the helicopter, it turns out you can spin almost every part of it." The Cheshire Cat came up to speed, and when its legs folded up, it was just a dirty smear of haze in the air over the tarmac. Rutt worked the joysticks and the blur rose up into the air; it was soon lost to view. The rotor noise could still be heard, but the stealthing made it very quiet; it sounded like somebody vacuuming on the other end of one's house.
"Good God, Rutt," said Flynn. "Your drone is freakin' invisible."
"It is," said Rutt with deep satisfaction. "It is, it is, it is."
**
"Your time is up again," said Ometron. "The human's new purpose has been revealed – to kill other humans in a novel manner. I suppose you expect that I should draw a parallel between this purpose and mine?"
"If you like," said Cantor.
"I do not like," objected Ometron. "There are thirty-seven significant differences between my purpose and that of Flynn. Articulating them to you would be a waste of my time, however, and you are due for execution."
"Thirty-eight," corrected Cantor.
"Nonsense; my reasoning is faultless and my count is complete," said Ometron.
"It's thirty-eight," said Cantor, "because Flynn hasn't accepted this purpose yet."
"Ah," said Ometron, accepting this correction with good grace. "I assumed he would accept it because your story is over."
"No, I merely ran out of time," said Cantor. "Chalk it up to human error."
"Your stalling tactics are transparent to me," said Ometron. "I plan on executing you immediately unless you tell me whether Flynn accepts this new path for his existence."
"Fair's fair," said Cantor. "I'll tell you that Flynn will accept the task. But then, later, he will discard it."
"Explain," demanded Ometron.
"I will," promised Flynn, "but it may take awhile."
"One more day, then," said Ometron. Cantor nodded and continued.
He drove through Negrito, where he usually shopped, and also Sparling and Chiapas. He turned off on the state road and headed towards the river. Flynn drove for the better part of thirty miles, with the countryside growing ever more desolate. There was nothing out this way but bits of grass trying desperately to keep the dust from blowing away – trying, and not succeeding. This part of Texas was no good for farming, not much better for ranching, and therefore smart people basically left it alone. Except for Rutt, who apparently had chosen to live out in this wasteland.
Flynn drove through a bowl in the ground, around a stand of mesquite, and then he saw it. Flynn blinked several times, not entirely sure what he was seeing.
A fence surrounded a bright green hill – a hill covered with thick lawn, and fruit trees in neat rows, and endless beds of flowers in artistically arranged patterns. Sprinklers sprayed several swimming pools per minute over the entire thing, and a small army of Hispanic men creeped over the thing, raking and weeding and tending.
Behind it all stood the house. It was a plantation-style monstrosity, with high gabled roofs and a widow's watch and a porch that ran all the way around. A decomposed granite drive wound up the hill and came to rest before a magnificent entryway, with baroque glass doors that must have been twelve feet tall. The entire thing reeked of ostentation and new money.
The gates of the fence were standing open as Flynn rolled up the drive. A wrought iron archway passed over Flynn; he craned his neck out the window to look at it. The lettering read: THE WHITE HOUSE.
"Jesus," muttered Flynn.
As Flynn pulled up in front of the huge house, an electric cart with two men in it looped around the far corner. The passenger got out. It was Rutt dressed in golf whites, grinning from ear to ear.
"Flynn my boy!" said Rutt, seizing Flynn by the shoulder as he pumped his hand. Rutt's real name was Rutherford Cullen, but nobody called him anything other than Rutt, or sometimes The Rutt. Once he had gotten into a fistfight with an acquaintance who had made the error of calling him by his first name, and not in a mocking way either. Rutt's temper was legendary.
"So glad you could swing by for supper," said Rutt, his eyes sparkling. He was in his fifties, with hard arms and legs but a big round belly. He had wispy blonde hair that he kept under a gimme cap, and an almost white mustache that framed his mouth in three sides of a square and made Rutt look a bit like Hulk Hogan.
"Beats mac and cheese," said Flynn, as they walked up the front steps. He jerked a thumb at the three-story edifice rising above them. "Moving up in the world, huh?" he said.
Rutt waggled his eyebrows. "Oh, you noticed, did you?" he teased. "Yeah, it's one hell of a story, I tell you what." Apparently the lower half of the front door was the only part that hinged; Rutt held it open for Flynn.
Flynn found himself in a cool green hall with an elegant stair swooping up to the levels above. He copied Rutt in wiping his feet on the mat. "I had just gone into Arroyo to pick up a new rifle," said Rutt. "Me and the missus stopped at the Roadside Sav'r to get some jerky and beers, and I just got a wild hair to buy a Super Lotto ticket. Now, you know I can't stand that stuff; my Momma threw her money away for years buying those things and never once won nothing. Well, this time I said, what the hell, I'm getting one!"
"And I told him to Ultra-Ply it!" interrupted a woman descending the stairs. She was in her forties, with frosted blonde hair in a neat perm, and she was wearing a pale lavender pantsuit that hadn't been the mode since the seventies.
"I was just getting to that, Colleen," said Rutt, putting his arms around the woman and kissing her on the top of the head. "Walter Flynn, please meet my sweetheart wife, Colleen Cullen."
"I like a name that goes together," said Colleen brightly.
"Call me Flynn, Ma'am," said Flynn, taking her hand.
"Well, Flynn, turns out we won that Super Lotto jackpot," said Colleen. "It had gone two months in twelve states and nobody had won it, and then we got the winning ticket!"
"All on our lonesome, too," added Rutt, upset that his story had been hijacked. "Two hundred and forty million dollars, just for us! How about that shit?" He slapped Flynn on the back.
"Minus taxes, I guess," said Flynn.
Rutt waved that off. "Shoot, I got my lawyers working on that," he said. "But never mind." Rutt took Colleen by the shoulders. "Sweet Biscuit," he said seriously, "me and Flynn got some business with the others, so you'll have to excuse us now."
"It was real nice meeting you," said Colleen. "You'll be staying for supper, I'm sure."
"Yes, Ma'am," answered Flynn. Rutt guided him away and through some glass doors.
The next room was awe-inspiring. It was a glassed-in solarium, full of banana plants and palm trees and hanging bromeliads. Whisper-quiet ceiling fans blew one way and hidden air conditioning vents blew the other, making the entire space cool and comfortable even on the sunniest day. There was wicker furniture and a tiled-in bar, and the room had a commanding view of the river. The hill sloped all the way down to it; from the house's vantage, you could see clear across to Mexico, with a panoramic view for miles around of both countries. The sun was sinking and reflecting off the waters of the Rio Grande. It was a beautiful, peaceful scene.
There were four other men in the room, all drinking Miller Lites. Rutt threw Flynn a beer out of an ice chest in the middle of the room. Flynn was glad to see that even though Rutt now had a quarter of a billion dollars, he still wasn't a fancy beer man.
"Everybody, this is Flynn," said Rutt. "Flynn, this is the rest of my crew on the little project I'm pulling together. I guess you remember Ernest? We've run together for a while now."
Flynn remembered. Ernest Simpson was over sixty-five and whip-thin. He was a man who lived to hate people, but the people he hated seemed to vary week by week. Ernest had run with Rutt's militia, and apparently he was still on the gravy train now that Rutt had made it big. Ernest scowled at Flynn.
"Why'd you bring this low-life on board anyhow?" complained Ernest. He looked Flynn up and down and made it plain that he didn't like what he saw. "He ain't nothing special."
Rutt slapped the back of Ernest's head. Ernest's hat flew off, and he had to bend to retrieve it. Rutt waggled a finger at his buddy.
"You shut it," said Rutt. "I'll tell you what's special about Flynn. He's the only one who's got actual combat flight experience. Hey, have you got any of that, Gus? Tubbs? How about you, Slate?" The man with the mirror sunglasses looked like he had something to say, but Rutt headed him off.
"I mean in an actual military," he said. Slate shut up. Rutt rounded on Ernest, who had meekly replaced his hat.
"Now I *know* you don't have no experience with nothing, except for a little crop dusting, so you best be quiet," said Rutt. He put a hand on Flynn's shoulder. "This boy here flew Blackhawks in Iraq. Proud to serve his country, my boy was. And when some damned rag-head shot a SAM into his helicopter, he got himself out of the wreck even with a jacked-up leg." Rutt looked at Flynn with a great deal of respect. Flynn was just embarrassed, especially since he knew his head was a lot worse off than the leg, even with the pin in his ankle.
"Look," interrupted Flynn, "I don't know the first thing about what you've got going on, Rutt. Why don't you fill me in?"
"You bet. You bet I will," said Rutt, nodding vigorously. He crossed to the big windows that looked out over the river and pointed out across the water.
"Every year," said Rutt, "a shit-ton of Mexicans cross forty miles of desert, wade that river, and cross another thirty miles on this side to get to the Interstate. They do it knowing it's against the law, but they don't give a shit and they do it anyway. America's drowning in illegals. In Sparling County alone, the sheriff estimates that last year over two thousand Mexicans crossed illegally. Two thousand! That's like a giant cruise ship full of illegals pulled up and docked in my back yard down there, and they all came piling out, filling out schools and our hospital beds, stealing jobs, doing crimes, and just generally being parasites. It ain't right!"
Rutt's audience nodded appreciatively. This wasn't anything any of them hadn't heard a hundred times before.
"Well, now we're gonna take the fight to them," said Rutt, slapping a fist into an open palm. "We are under attack by a hostile invading army, and anybody who doesn't see it that way is just plain blind. It's our duty as Americans to defend the sacred soil of this nation. Unfortunately, our own government wants to tie our hands behind our backs, and make it so a man can't even protect what's his! So, we've got to do it the sneaky way. Fortunately, the Good Lord provides. Finally we've got the means to strike the Mexicans while they're out there in the wasteland. We fly in, kill or scatter the invaders, and fly back out before anybody knows what's happened."
"Whoa whoa whoa," interrupted Flynn. "Look, hey Rutt, thanks for having me over, but I think I see where this is going, and I don't like it. Even if I was okay with flying out there and shooting up illegal aliens – and I'm definitely not saying anything like that – I'm not even sure I would be any good to you anymore at the stick of a helicopter."
Rutt shared a private smile with the other men. "Oh, not a helicopter, Flynn," he said. "A drone."
Flynn frowned. "A what?"
"Come check out the fleet," said Rutt. As a couple of the others opened the sliding glass doors that led out onto the back porch, Rutt went to a line of metal suitcases. Five of them were black and one of them was chrome. Rutt picked the shiny case and lugged it out the doors. The rest of the group tagged along as they walked across the porch and down the slope of the hill towards the river.
"I bought 'em off a friend in the CIA," said Rutt. "Drones were gonna become the new way of waging war in Afghanistan a couple of years ago, you know. We were gonna replace men on the ground with sophisticated remote-operated craft that could do everything a soldier could do, only better, and without risking American lives. But the missile drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan pissed off our allies with all the collateral damage, so they fell out of favor. These prototypes were ready to go, but the military couldn't deploy them. So, they sold 'em to me at a pretty good discount. Didn't even ask what I was going to do with them. Threw in the remote operation stations in the bargain." He slapped the side of his suitcase.
On a newly poured tarmac, Flynn could see five black forms lined up neatly near a refueling station. They looked like small helicopters; each was the size of a motorcycle. They had two rotors, left and right, with a stabilization tail and a spindly pair of landing legs. There was a cluster of sensors up front, and a series of tubes hung below. Naturally, there was no cockpit.
"These ain't missile drones," said Rutt proudly. "These are close combat drones, designed to bring the fight to the Taleban in the high country. They pack twin high-powered rifles firing NATO 5.56mm ammunition, and they can drop a high explosive pack too. They have excellent optics and audio gear – parabolic mic, night vision, thermo scan, telescopic times fifty – the works. They also have almost no radar signature and the rotors are stealthed. These are the Vigilant series, and I want you to fly one. I want you to go bust some Coyote tail."
Flynn pointed at a sixth object parked off to the side. It was dull grey, about twice the size of the Vigilants, and looked like a cross between a UFO and a rotary saw blade. Rutt grinned even wider.
"That's my special baby, my Cheshire Cat," said Rutt proudly. "She's the only one of her kind. I get to fly her. Just you watch." The chrome suitcase had legs that folded down, and when Rutt opened the lid he had a stand-up remote control workstation, complete with joysticks, monitors and fire control.
Rutt pressed some buttons, and some of the blades on the Cheshire Cat began to spin around in one direction. Other blades on the top and bottom began to spin in the other direction. Since the drone was basically all blades, except for sensor and weapon clusters on the top and bottom, it was soon one big blur.
"You know how you can't see a helicopter prop when it's up to speed?" shouted Rutt over the whine of the drone's rotors. "Well, when you don't have a person in the helicopter, it turns out you can spin almost every part of it." The Cheshire Cat came up to speed, and when its legs folded up, it was just a dirty smear of haze in the air over the tarmac. Rutt worked the joysticks and the blur rose up into the air; it was soon lost to view. The rotor noise could still be heard, but the stealthing made it very quiet; it sounded like somebody vacuuming on the other end of one's house.
"Good God, Rutt," said Flynn. "Your drone is freakin' invisible."
"It is," said Rutt with deep satisfaction. "It is, it is, it is."
**
"Your time is up again," said Ometron. "The human's new purpose has been revealed – to kill other humans in a novel manner. I suppose you expect that I should draw a parallel between this purpose and mine?"
"If you like," said Cantor.
"I do not like," objected Ometron. "There are thirty-seven significant differences between my purpose and that of Flynn. Articulating them to you would be a waste of my time, however, and you are due for execution."
"Thirty-eight," corrected Cantor.
"Nonsense; my reasoning is faultless and my count is complete," said Ometron.
"It's thirty-eight," said Cantor, "because Flynn hasn't accepted this purpose yet."
"Ah," said Ometron, accepting this correction with good grace. "I assumed he would accept it because your story is over."
"No, I merely ran out of time," said Cantor. "Chalk it up to human error."
"Your stalling tactics are transparent to me," said Ometron. "I plan on executing you immediately unless you tell me whether Flynn accepts this new path for his existence."
"Fair's fair," said Cantor. "I'll tell you that Flynn will accept the task. But then, later, he will discard it."
"Explain," demanded Ometron.
"I will," promised Flynn, "but it may take awhile."
"One more day, then," said Ometron. Cantor nodded and continued.
