Guardians Inc.:Thundersword (Guardians Incorporated #2) (2 page)

      “Might be a trap,” Tony cautioned.

      “I sense no magic coming from it,” Elise said.

      “It might not be magical.”

      “There is no apparent chemical tampering,” Bolswaithe offered. “No traces of biological venom or toxin either.”

      Tony opened his hands at the butler. “Now tell me how you know that?” he asked.  “Did you take it to a lab already?”      

      Thomas and Elise knew that Bolswaithe was probably the most advanced robot in the world, but at his request, they kept his identity to themselves. Tony and Henri, the grotesque who guarded Pervagus Mansion along with his brothers, remained oblivious, but Tony was getting wiser every day, and he’d already said something about Bolswaithe’s abilities “not being natural.”

      Bolswaithe patted his goggles nonchalantly. “Built-in Spectrophotometer.”

      “Really...” Tony grabbed his own goggles and checked them against Bolswaithe’s. “Same model, same brand, but mine are only tinted. Why would yours be different?” He flashed Thomas a puzzled look.

      Bolswaithe extended his goggles to Tony. “You can check the results yourself if you want. Just use the transient absorption instead of the time-resolved Spectroscopy, and be ready to compensate for inter-modulation when using the four wave mixed setting. Just be careful with the feedback, or it might blind you for a couple of hours. Nothing permanent.”

      Tony froze short of taking the goggles, and Bolswaithe lifted an eyebrow. Thomas suppressed a giggle.

      “You…ah…” Tony hesitated. “You double-checked?”

      “Triple-checked. There are no traces of chemical or biological agents or contaminants.”

      Tony pulled back his hand. “Then we’ll take your word for it.” He smacked his lips together. “Go ahead, Thomas.”

      Thomas pulled the stiletto from the wall and handed it over to Tony. He was more interested in whatever message his grandfather had sent him than the little dagger. He pulled out the white card from the envelope and opened it. It was a simple message written in the same elegant handwriting.

      
Happy 16
^th
, Tom.

Love, 

      Gramps

P.S. Enjoy and be careful!

      Thomas’s eyes watered, but he held back his tears. His birthday had been a couple of months ago, and only those close to him in Guardians Inc. had thrown him a little celebration. He had moved from his hometown in Ohio to Carlsbad, California to live with his grandfather after his parents disappeared. They were going on a cruise and were never heard from again. Thomas had received a couple of e-mails from his friends in Ohio, but he'd attended less than a month at the high school at Carlsbad—not enough time to make a lasting relationship at all. In the nine months since he had become a Cypher and joined the Guardians his life had been completely absorbed by the company. Just learning the basics of the seven-thousand-year-old organization was daunting. Most people spent years of study just to become Guardians with the most basic clearance. Others like Tony, whose family had been with the Guardians since the Renaissance, had lived in the organization all their lives and still didn’t have the clearance or knowledge Thomas had as a Cypher. Working in Pervagus Library, with its unlimited access to all human knowledge helped, but part of him still wished for the simpler life he had before, away from secrets he wasn’t supposed to know, or the burden they brought now that he was at the forefront of Guardians Inc.

      Above all, he missed Gramps.

      Something else was at the bottom of the envelope. He turned it over and a key fell on his palm. An old key—its teeth were a little bit eroded from use, but Thomas knew that it still worked fine.

      It was a wonderful gift, and Thomas smiled in a way he hadn’t smiled since becoming the Cypher.

      “So?” Elise asked. “What is it?”

      Thomas held the key for all to see. “I got a car,” he said, beaming.

An Infinitesimal Change

      “So, is it an old car?” Elise asked as she stepped over the armor carrier bag the engineers had given each one of them, and then pressed the release button on her shoulder. The armor lost cohesion and its scales fell neatly inside the bag.

      Wearing the armor was like being encased on a magnetic building toy, like the ones Thomas had as a kid with a big magnet base he’d built by adding little, metal rods, ball bearings, and flakes into a sculpture. The armor worked exactly like that except he didn’t have to attach each of the scales; the scales remembered their place in the armor and they reattached themselves when the shoulder unit was activated.

        As always Bolswaithe had begun to explain to Thomas how the armor functioned, but Thomas stopped him the moment he started talking about the Einstein-de Haas effect and the Biot-Savart Law.

      “So, it’s like one of those magnet toys?” Thomas asked and Bolswaithe nodded. Thomas felt bad every time he had to interrupt Bolswaithe, but sometimes his explanations were like listening to a lecture about how a Formula 1 car automatic transmission worked…in Latin. And the one thing his Cypher powers didn’t do was translate spoken languages. He could read Chinese, Finnish, or even Egyptian hieroglyphics, but he could only understand spoken English, and thanks to his grandmother’s heritage and his time living in California, most of the curse words in Spanish.

      At least Bolswaithe never seemed to mind cutting short his explanations; he always found another interesting topic to talk about.

      “Old?” Tony interrupted while disengaging his own armor. About half of the scales fell out of the bag, so he held the shoulder unit away from his body and turned it on. The chest plate reassembled on the air, and then he placed it into the bag. “It’s a Classic car, girl. A Classic, show some respect.”

      The 1959 Impala was more than a Classic car for Thomas; it was his grandfather’s most precious possession and a family heirloom. Gramps had already promised to give the car to his parents, and his father had told Thomas all the little stories of the car and what it meant for the family. His father dreamed of the day when he would give it to him.
“You’ll meet the girl of your dreams in this car,”
he’d always said.

      Thomas stepped into his bag and disengaged the armor, rubbing the car key with pride. “Who wants a ride?” he asked. The car was stored at the Mansion along with boxes and crates full of everything that had been salvaged from his house. Henri and his brother grotesque Jean Luc had demolished his house fighting Wraith creatures, and he had only visited the storage a couple of times to get pictures of his family. He’d left the car just as Grandpa had left it…covered in a soft tarp.

      “I’m in!” Tony said, lifting up his bag. “We can cruise Athens in style and then have a Mediterranean dinner.” He pursed his lips; he’d already heard stories about the car and what it meant to Thomas.

      “It’ll have to wait,” Bolswaithe interrupted. “Doctor Franco and Ms. Khanna are waiting for us.”

      “Well,” Tony said, “after that.”

      “After that is training session, study hall, then library work,” Bolswaithe added. Thomas bit his lip and began to walk away toward the door that connected the Church of Nereo and Achilleo across the street from Caracalla Baths to the Mansion.

      “You’re a real fun sponge sometimes, Bolswaithe. You know?” Tony whispered as he leaned closer to the butler.

      Bolswaithe watched Thomas’s face very carefully as he opened the door.

Something happened in Bolswaithe’s neural quantum computer as qubits arranged themselves in an algorithm he had never experienced before.

      His left eye twitched involuntarily a couple of times.

      In all the time since his activation, Bolswaithe had worked with preset reactions, always tailoring his responses and actions to words and situations based on learned values. He had always responded to exterior stimuli choosing from the preset reactions, and his learning matrix allowed him to store the responses he got back from the environment and persons around him to advance the preset values he already had, which then furthered his tailoring of responses.

      As advanced as Bolswaithe was, he was ultimately a machine, a piece of technology so advanced that it mimicked real life. His designers had planned on that. Even if humans around him forgot that fact, he always knew he was a machine with preset reactions.

      Until this time. This time, the look on Thomas’s face made an internal change. 

      Unexpected, surprising, and quite powerful.

      By following his programming, he had made Thomas feel discouraged. By reminding Thomas what he needed to do at that exact moment, and with those words and inflection, Bolswaithe had made Thomas lose all excitement about his gift.

In a direct confrontation to his orders of keeping Thomas alive and well, in all respects, including psychologically and emotionally, he had caused an adverse effect in Thomas.

He had let him down.

And that, in turn, affected him in a way he had never experienced before.

      Bolswaithe analyzed his own reaction and could only come to the conclusion that he had experienced empathy. He understood that what he had experienced was completely out of his parameters and original programming, and that for the first time he had crossed into one of the scenarios his creators had theorized his quantum computer brain could actually develop.

      For the first time, Bolswaithe
felt
.

Sitrep

      Doctor Franco’s office was one of the most interconnected rooms of Pervagus Mansion. To the real world, Guardians Inc. had presence in all major cities in the form of skyscrapers. At the top of each building, visitors entering the Hong Kong branch would look out the large windows and see the familiar Central District and harbor beyond. The same applied to visitors entering the Santiago, Boston, Berlin, Pretoria, or any of the other buildings around the world, and they would always see the familiar skyline of their respective cities.

It wasn’t just the view though; thanks to the Mansion’s transport system the offices occupied the physical space that the Doctor needed or requested. The loss of cellular service to the visitors’ phones was always explained with the need for security by the Doctor. Many other companies had the same measures, so it had never been an issue.

      The same trans-situation system made it impossible for someone from the outside to look into the office. Even if they somehow found the plans of the buildings, they would not show Doctor Franco’s office; it was like looking through a one-way mirror.

      As Thomas entered the office, the view changed from Sydney’s harbor with the Opera house in the background to a view dominated by the Eiffel Tower. When the Doctor was alone or with Guardians Inc. employees with sufficient access the views rotated between the separate buildings around the world and Thomas thought that the change in scenery maybe was connected to the Doctor’s mood.

Since meeting the Doctor for the first time, Thomas had learned to almost “read” the Doctor’s moods through his fidgeting. The CEO of Guardians Inc. was always on a constant state of movement. His hands fidgeted, his Daliesque moustache twitched, his lips trembled, and his eyes rolled or jumped constantly from one side to the other. His eyebrows were a telltale sign of what he was thinking—a disbelieving, single eyebrow arch or a double lift for surprise. He had never seen a double arch for anger, although Killjoy had told him it happened sometimes. The Doctor tapped his fingers while he listened, and gestured with his hands as he spoke. If he was sitting at a meeting he somehow kept his upper body still while one, or sometimes both, knees pumped up and down. Thomas had even seen him shuffling his feet as if practicing a twist dance while listening to an important presentation or report.

Maybe the Doctor’s fidgeting was because he could read most minds and it was probably very taxing to be aware of everyone’s thoughts.

Or maybe it was a very elaborate misdirection strategy. Thomas had talked with Tony about the Doctor often, and they had come to the conclusion that the Doctor was probably the most powerful man in the world and to anyone who didn’t know him, he probably looked absurd with his fidgeting, cane and ever-present cravat tie around his neck.

Nothing more than just a perfect cliché of the rich, mildly loony, and eccentric. Thomas had certainly thought that way about the Doctor at first.

      The other wall of Doctor Franco’s office was decorated with masterful paintings and various photographs of the Doctor and different heads of state. Two large full bookcases were side by side, and on the wall behind the desk was a mosaic of large screen TVs displaying real-time information from stock markets, news, and weather from around the world. One of the monitors displayed in different colors the alerts the Guardians had confirmed as Magic interfering with technology. “Technical Blue” and “Potentially Yellow” alerts dotted the map, but so far no “Fatality Red” dots had appeared.

      As soon as they came in, Doctor Franco stopped looking at the monitors, and a wall slid open covering the TVs.

      Killjoy was sitting by the desk in her usual Vice Principal disguise. She was slowly sipping on her coffee mug and her metal pad rested atop the Doctor’s desk. Her thick glasses were hanging from a chain around her neck, and her beautiful, light-brown eyes centered on Thomas.

      It was uncanny how Killjoy could disguise herself from the tall, six-armed, Master-at-arms, beautiful Doyenne Kiran, to the triple-chinned, barrel-bodied Vice Principal Ms. “Killjoy” Khanna with just a knitted sweater, long skirt, and large glasses. He had seen her literally transform countless times at the Five Treasures of Snow Dojo, but he had never ceased to marvel at the transformation itself, a well-practiced ballet as her six arms undid buttons and pulled on belts, and her body seemed to unfold from within the confines of her barreled sweater. He no longer had the interaction with her stern but fair “Killjoy,” Vice Principal persona anymore. Even when in disguise she remained Doyenne of Martial Arts. He knew how strong she really was, how inflexible she could be when teaching, and how dangerous she could be as a fighter.