He and Buzz face each other in the parking garage. In spite of the soaking in the bar the night before, Buzz seems perfectly calm now. “I thought I’d find you here.”

Danny figures he owes Buzz an explanation, at the very least. He owes him a chance.

“Buzz,” he begins.

“Robert. My name is Robert.”

“Right. Sorry.” He starts again. “Robert. You need to know what’s going on here.”

“Let me guess,” Buzz says. “There’s something bad coming, and it’s going to kill everyone, and you need my help to stop it.”

Danny nods.

Buzz smiles. “Yeah. I know.”

For a moment, Danny is relieved. He thinks that this means Buzz is on his side. Together, they are about to start putting things right.

Then Buzz cracks him across the skull with the Beretta 9mm he had hidden in his pocket.

Danny’s head bounces off the side of his rental car, and he goes down on the concrete.

Sometimes, Danny thinks, right before everything goes dark, I am not very smart at all.

Buzz picks him up and slings him into the trunk of the BMW, then gets behind the wheel and drives away.

INTERLUDE: The Final Secret of Dr. Sax

INTERLUDE

The Final Secret of Dr. Sax

MIDDLETON. THEN.

Something is different, Danny thought. Something is wrong.

They were in the office of Dr. Edgar Sax, who held a held a gun on him. His father sat in the chair before Sax’s desk, his arms and legs tied. Danny wore his SharpWatch, the wrist-top computer he’d invented, which could hack any system within a dozen yards. And of course there was RANN-D, his faithful personal robot, at his side, whirring and waiting for orders.

In other words, business as usual for the ongoing corporate struggle between Sharp Industries and Sax Enterprises.

Danny was grateful, at moments like this, for what had been diagnosed on a number of personality inventories as a “lack of affect” and “low stress reaction.” Put simply, he didn’t feel as much as other people did, and scary things usually didn’t scare him that much.

Those traits were also generally found in psychopaths, which, admittedly, was not great. He’d wondered for a while now if he had a hole inside him where other people had normal feelings. He’d been using his HEP for so long that it was almost automatic, but he still wondered if he was broken in some essential way.

On the upside, however, it meant he could think more clearly, especially when there were people chasing him, or explosions in the lab, or his father was tied to a chair with a gun to his head.