Today's Reading
"I'll be arriving on a ship called Metis," he added. "It's something. I can't wait for you to see it."
"Metis? I've heard of them. Like the Indigenous people of Canada?" Mallory asked.
"Metis like the badass Titan of wisdom, mother of Athena," Xan said patiently. "But hey, keynote speech! Are you excited?"
She opened her mouth for a sarcastic answer but then froze. "May 16?" she asked, panicked. "What's today in the Earth calendar?"
Xan thought for a second. "The thirteenth."
"Oh, God." She covered her face with her hands. "Did he say I was going to be in a LARP?"
"Yep, he did. It stands for Live-Action Role-Playing."
"I know what LARP stands for!" she said. "I was confirming. That's why I want you to kill me." She collapsed on her couch.
Instead of doing as she asked, Xan advanced to the next message, sent by himself. "Mallory? You going to meet us at Ferd's? Tina is on board but only for a few hours." Xan turned and gave her a pointed look. "That was sent three hours ago."
"I'm sorry, Xan. I admit I've been slack with answering my agent, but communing with the Sundry all afternoon and night takes a lot out of me. And time has no meaning when you're in there." She gestured to her bedroom, where the Sundry's hums were still audible, waiting for her.
Xan sat down beside her with a sigh. "I get it. Sometimes when I'm talking to Infinity it gets that way. But Tina was bummed you missed her."
Mallory smiled. "I'm surprised she didn't come break down my door."
"Oh, she wanted to," Xan said. "But I told her we shouldn't do that anymore. She was worried you were injured and she was the only one who could save you."
"She wasn't a hundred percent wrong," she said, pointing to the lump on her forehead. "Mobius got a little feisty."
Xan leaned in, examining her forehead. "He really nailed you, didn't he?" She nodded. "I'm surprised things haven't gotten easier for you."
"The minute we get someone on board who can tell me how to parent a toddler who can fly and cause concussions, let me know." She rubbed the back of her neck. "I'm exhausted, and not just from him. The Sundry are demanding."
"Are you learning much more about accessing the hivemind?" he asked.
She shrugged, not looking at him. "I guess so. 'Learning' doesn't seem like the right thing, more like just getting comfortable with them. I can't control anything." She frowned as memories surfaced. "I think I saw Stephanie and Tina in the cargo bay, but I am not entirely sure. Connecting with the Sundry feels very passive. I see the data but there's no emotion attached to it. If the hivemind doesn't feel anything, then I don't either. And that's just weird. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with it."
Xan leaned back on the couch and pushed his round glasses up his nose. "Probably you're supposed to do what the Sundry do. Just gather info and store it."
"That sounds like I'd be just like Harriet the Spy and I will end up with no one trusting me," she said, then surprised herself by laughing. "But I guess I was already in that camp."
"So, are you going to do this murder convention thing?" he asked. "Or are you afraid someone's going to get whacked for real?"
"Of course I think that," she said, irritated. "I always think that. But I don't know how I can get out of it. Maybe I'll just hide."
He didn't look at her as he said, "Mal, how many murders have you solved?"
"I guess I'm on seventeen or nineteen or something," she said.
"And those are murders happening to you on approximately eighteen days of your life. On the twelve thousand other days, there haven't been murders, right?"
She narrowed her eyes. "That's fast math. Did you come here with this fact holstered?"
He grinned, still looking at the ceiling. "Answer the question."
"The years before I got stung by the Sundry don't count," she countered. "So that's a few thousand days gone from your fancy math."
...
