The admiral and general said their good-byes, closing the call, both satisfied with the conversation for now. The admiral had to meet his son for dinner. Apparently a new girl was in the boy’s life, and the admiral always liked picking on his son about his unfortunate choices in women.

* * *

Having reviewed their entire discussion, and having hacked into and watched the meeting from the same remote view as the general, the AI transmitted to the eight that there was currently no need to further increase the mission’s exposure by killing the remaining scientists. It would continue to monitor the actions of both Neal Danielson and Madeline Cavanagh, but for now the immediate threat appeared to have passed.

Chapter 21: It’s Bad to be Home

Neal pushed opened the door to his apartment in Arizona and immediately reeled at the smell. It had been nearly three months since he had left for Florida.

Seeing a pizza box on the floor, he felt a wash of shame. That was bad, even for him. His mind went to whether he had emptied his fridge. He hadn’t. But he had remembered to unplug his air conditioner to save electricity during the Arizona winter, such was the confoundable rationale of his sometime excuse for a brain.

Covering his mouth and nose with his grey T-shirt, he stepped over the mound of junk mail around his door and walked to the window, leaving the door open behind him. After wrangling the window open, cracking the flaky old paint that held it in place to do so, he grabbed his tall trash can from one side and pulled its bag out, itself another thing he had forgotten to empty. It was doing its bit for the aroma as well, no doubt.

The pizza box was damp through on the bottom and Neal feared it would collapse under its own weight, visions of a collapsing star coming to mind, and the relatively comparable destruction this box’s unleashed contents would do to his floor. But he was spared that. It wasn’t until he opened the door to the fridge that he was hit with a wall of pungency akin to, well, he didn’t really know how to classify it: road kill, maybe? The puff of gas from a month-old corpse spontaneously combusting? No, that wasn’t quite it. It was like an athlete’s reused jock strap … dipped in excrement … and then baked.

He gagged, barely controlling himself, then set to making his home smell a little less like a French cheese shop.