Critical Path

It was made even sweeter for the added drop of rum from his own reserves—which sadly were running lower than he anticipated. While he and Mai were still in Manhattan, working in the basement of his and Charlie’s old workplace, Quartanary Productions, they had ventured out into the ruins of the city and managed to salvage a few dozen bottles of choice beverages.

Even diluting it and keeping it to a few drops a day, they’d got through it quicker than they realized, but then Mike rationalized it away, thinking that due to his insistence on not taking the root and thus ageing like a normal human, that he’d likely meet his end before he would take the last sip of rum.

He still believed that despite being down to just three bottles.

It was now a turtle racing a tortoise: rum or life, which would run out first?

Not being the sort to dwell on such matters, he took a deep gulp of the tea and exhaled with satisfaction as the hot soothing drink warmed his belly. The clock on the wall of his office ticked and tocked, reminding him that his lunch break would soon be over and he’d have to return to the job at hand.

Not that his students were paying much attention today. The news of Charlie’s possible survival had quickly got around soon after Layla, Denver, and the others had left. It sent a ripple of excitement and distraction throughout the facility.

Mike couldn’t blame them. Charlie was a legend, living or not, for what he had done. Even Mike and Mai were treated like some kind of rebellion heroes, when all they did was solve an engineering problem.

Watching the time run down, signaling the end of his break, he fussed with the myriad piles of paper towering over his desk and floor. Bits of croatoan technology pulled from the wreckages of hover-bikes and harvesters littered the office, turning it into some kind of alien scrap yard, yet for all the criticism he received because of his so-called chaotic ways, he knew where everything was and could get to it in an instant.

That’s just how he and Mai liked to work.

Everything everywhere and available.

No mucking about hunting through drawers and cabinets, or moving from one room to another like his students preferred. They’d been brought up on the farm under the croatoan idea of organization and knew nothing better—until now—but getting them to change their ways was proving harder than either he or Mai first realized. Their minds weren’t so malleable anymore, and it took them a great deal of time to teach them about human engineering history and what could or couldn’t be done with materials and technology at hand.

Most of them weren’t even born before the apocalypse, so they had no real idea about large-scale infrastructure, architecture, bridge building, or smaller stuff like vehicle design and engine mechanics.

Still, some were brighter than others and had shown promise—especially with the alien tech. It felt odd to him that they were more comfortable working on that than they were human technology.

The door to his office flew open, sending the piles of paper flying, sheets flapping about the densely packed room like large confetti.

“Come in,” Mike said, not hiding the sarcasm.

“Mr. Strauss, I—”

“Evangeline, how many times? Call me Mike. What’s up? You look flustered.”

The woman, in her late twenties, wore her blonde hair down to her shoulders. It flew in all directions, obscuring her soft Italian features. The collar to her white lab coat was up, and the tails flapped around her jeans. Perspiration covered her forehead and she panted as if she had been running.

“Come quick,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you. It worked!”

“The bead?” Mike asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, your idea was right.”

Of course it was right. He’d only been working on it since the day dear Pippa brought it into the office all those years ago.

* * *

Mike strode across the workshop and closed down the bulletproof glass door of the six-foot-tall cabinet and locked the latch.

Within the cabinet, sitting on a single shelf, was one of the croatoan blue beads. When the aliens had deserted the farms to go north, they had made sure that all the humans left behind had their beads removed.

Not only did it keep them same from any potential hidden alien threat, but it also gave Mike, Evangeline, and the others plenty of samples to test his theories. It had taken two weeks of trial and error and tweaking of his prototype, but if what his assistant said was true, they had finally got it right.

“Okay, stand back,” Mike said to Evangeline, bringing her to the rear of the room where the workbenches lined the walls. They were some twenty feet away from what he called the bomb cabinet. The glass of which showed hundreds of scratches and abrasions from his various experiments over the weeks.

It was designed to withhold the blast of half a pound of C4 so would be more than enough protection for this experiment.