Chapter 25

Daniel went over the conversation with the Fosters he’d had the yesterday. His mind still whirled as if it were a topsy-turvy toy. He had a hard time making sense of things. Jillian Foster’s dream mirrored his own experience. The triangular shaped object—dare he believe, dare he hope it was a ship?—the light from underneath. The odd way it moved. The only difference in her dream and the memory of the young boy he’d been was there were no men in white coats who loitered under it.

Nor of robots.

He sighed and ordered Dino to hand him the drone Homeland Security wanted him to work on. As Dino’s lumbering steps made their way over to his table, he went over the snippets of the conversation with the Fosters.

When they offered C. A. D. I. to him as a down payment, he knew what that translated to—the university would have first dibs on offering funding and research on the android. The fact they had turned down Horizon Bionix’s offer and would instead give the android to a local university spoke volumes.

This morning at breakfast, he watched the replay of an interview Jackson and Jillian had done from the VEX conference after the shockwave that refusing Horizon Bionix’s money. Some thought that Jack and Jill Technologies were playing the robotic industry’s game of ‘hard to get’, holding out for another offer from a similarly placed conglomerate like Stallworth’s company. Their infamy at turning down two hundred thousand had nonetheless earned them a certain stardom. It was extremely rare that winners of VEX don’t quickly sell and turn over all rights to the highest bidder and become company lapdogs with prestigious titles and salaries.

But after what they told him yesterday, he knew they wouldn’t sell to anyone.

He’d made a phone call to the Dean before heading over to his class that morning. The Dean, readily accepted the offer Jack and Jill Technologies handed to them on a solid gold platter although the Dean’s words more or less showed his true motivation.

“The governments of the developed world and leaders of the private sector are going to be crawling over each other once they hear about this!”

He went about teaching his classes but the day was a blur as his mind kept going back to Jillian’s dreams. What it could all mean? Was it mere coincidence that she would have such a vivid recollection of an event which she said never happened?

Was it a coincidence he experienced an event he tried to pretend never happened?