Chapter 77

I woke up alert and focused. I didn't say or think anything, just hopped up and stripped off the suit. With the suit off I threw open the curtains to see the light of morning greeting me.

"Anybody home?" I thought to myself.

"Home and glad to be back," Bud's familiar mental voice responded.

"The three amigos ride again," Harley cheered.

"Glad to have you back where you belong, my friend," I said to Bud, and meant it.

"We have much to discuss," Bud said. "You should get your shower and get your breakfast so we can get started."

"Nu uh, I need a run first. Then shower and breakfast."

And that's what I did. In fact I ran the property line twice, it felt so good. The shower was extra long as well. By the time I got back downstairs, I could smell coffee brewing and when I walked in the kitchen, Mrs. Trinh was sitting at the table enjoying a waffle and some strawberries.

"There's more batter on the counter and the waffle iron is still hot," she commented as I poured myself a cup of cofffee.

"Sounds good," I said, taking a sip of the coffee and groaning at the pleasure of it. Mrs. Trinh made much better coffee than I did.

I got a waffle started in the iron and looked to see if there were more strawberries ready in the fridge. There were.

"This is great, thanks," I said when I sat down with my cup of coffee to wait for the waffle to cook.

"Well, I had a craving for waffles this morning, and its much easier to make batter for two than for one. Also, the strawberries need to be eaten in the next few days to be at their best, so they were a good accompaniment."

I agreed. I felt agreeable today. I hope nobody asked for anything unreasonable today, I was likely to give it to them.

When I finished breakfast, I took a cup of coffee with me and headed for the basement.

"We need to get the suit and bring it with us," Bud reminded. I'd left it in the bedroom where I'd taken it off this morning. I ran upstairs and grabbed it. On the way back down the stairs, Bud asked me to grab my laptop and cell phone. They were both sitting on the coffee table in the living room. Soon enough I had the suit crumpled up in one hand, the laptop in the other and the phone stuffed in back pocket of the hiking shorts I'd decided to wear until it was time to head out for lunch.

"Go ahead and put the suit on," Bud told me once we were in the cavern. I did, wondering as I did why the cavern seemed different to me somehow this morning.

"Okay, now what?" I asked.

"Hood too," he admonished. Oh yeah. I pulled the hood up letting it cover my face. The suit's systems began firing up, but this time, it wasn't Bud's suit voice I heard, it was another, similar, but different voice.

"Mark I Tk Suit prototype now active." Hmm. The suit was a prototype now? The voice seemed much more mechanical than Bud's had been too. The HUD flickered to life and an overlay diagram of the suit itself came into view. It began cycling through the various systems, showing their status. It was very cool to see the power meter completely full.

"Just as Harley is able to manage your flight-locking for you, I'm going to be able to manage the suit systems for you. The suit now has its own internal AI system that I will control. This will allow you to use the suit without having to focus internally."

"I see," I said, thinking about that for a moment. It made sense, really, and who understood the suit's systems better than Bud? "I notice that the suit refers to itself as a prototype. Are we going to be making us a Mark II soon?"

"Indeed," Bud said with those familiar dry tones I'd been missing. "We should begin tomorrow. We will use the suit to assist."

"Excellent," I agreed. "I assume we're going to be getting out sometime soon to someplace where we can get some exoskeleton practice in too?"

"Of course," perhaps even this evening, if all goes well."

"Excellent!" I thought.

"Now, remove the hood for the moment, if you would."

"All right," I said, doing so.

"Now try calling someone on your cell phone."

"Huh?" I said, puzzled. The phone didn't work down here and Bud knew that.

"Please, just try and call someone."

"Okay," I shrugged and found Vic Sloane's number in the address book and dialed it. My first clue should have been the fact that the phone told me I had full bars. That became obvious when Vic answered the phone. He was surprised to hear from me, but I passed it off as wanting to warn him that he might get visited by people from Preston & Roberts, and that it was okay to talk to them, as they were working for me. We chit chatted a bit, but there wasn't really any news yet on the Fred Conway front.

"Okay, so that was new," I said out loud after hanging up with Vic.

"Yes, your being out of touch while down here was problematic, so it has been corrected."

"Cool," I said, grinning. "But that's not all you did, is it? I can feel something else changed down here."

"You're right, of course. What did you sense?"

"I don't know, it just seemed different somehow when we walked in."

"Back here," he said, and I knew where he meant. Ahh, back to those little background mental communications we'd lost while he'd been in the suit!

There was a large, gray rectangular block of something sitting against a wall in one corner of the cave that hadn't been there before.

"What is that?" I asked.

"It is, at its heart, a computer," Bud answered. "But it is really more than that, it is a communications system."

"What does it communicate with?" Harley asked.

"The best thing to do is show you," Bud answered. "We need your laptop now."

So I opened the laptop and got it out of hibernation.

"Check your available wireless networks," Bud asked. I did. There was a new one called TkOne. It had full bars. "Connect to that one."

I tried, and it immediately requested authentication. "Well?"

"Enter the following string," Bud prompted, and rattled off a 140 character string, several of which I had to search the keyboard for. It took me three tries before I got it right. Probably missed uppercase on a character somewhere, or typed a dash when I needed an underline or something. Finally though, success.