Talia emphasised her point and wiped the man’s blood off on her pantleg.
“Did you have to stab him in the face?”Sparx removed his helmet.
“What would you suggest?”
“I don’t know?Maybe slit his throat?”
“I’m not Sesi.”
Sparx rolled his eyes, but stopped once he caught Talia’s glare.“How did you learn so much about motorcycle tyres?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then why did you ask what kind they were?”
“Physics.”
Sparx tilted his head in annoyance.
Talia sighed.“If they were winter tyres, they’d have to be soft.”
“So, you guessed?”Sparx’s mouth hung open.“That was our lives on the line!”
Talia narrowed her eyes.“I don’t guess.I do math.”
Sesi spun from side to side in her torn leather chair.“Apologies for my delay.In my defence, your method of scheduling an appointment was rather unconventional.”
“As was your method of requesting one.”Black glared.
Sesi didn’t react.“You’ve had time to read the dossier?”
“I have.I can’t say I believe it.”
Sesi cocked an eyebrow and stared for several moments before she leaned forward.“You didn’t know, did you?”
Callum’s lips formed a thin white line.
Sesi returned to her relaxed position.“That would explain why you were working with the Natalists,” Sesi mused.“What did they promise you for delivering Talia?”
Callum tapped into anger to mask his annoyance.
Sesi waved it away, her face contorted in disgust.She was a lot less willing to play neutral than Siku.“Never mind, I don’t want to know.’
“This entire dossier is a joke.”Callum spat.“You want me to believe that human cells suddenly gained a novel organelle and no-one noticed?Or that we put it there and not a single scientist bothered to mention it?”Black’s hand twitched against the arm of the chair.
Sesi’s eyes lit up like a professor with an eager protégé.“See, we thought the same thing.But Georgtoldyou what Model 21 was and you didn’t believe him.”Sesi wagged her finger.“You killed him even.Because you couldn’t believe that your great grandpappy hadn’t planned to take you with him.That he used you while the rest of the population slowly died out so he could have the planet to himself.”
“There are moregreatsthan that.”Callum interjected.
“Whatever,” Sesi shrugged.“The thing is, peopledidnotice.But it’s really easy to silence scientists whose funding depends entirely on corporations and governments.”Sesi spread her hands “Replace them all with DocPods and AI tools and then it’s trivial to rewrite textbooks.Especially when they’re all electronic.If anydospeak out, they’re painted ascrazy.”
“Then where’s your proof?”
Sesi grinned and threw a thick biology textbook on the desk.“To be fair,” she nudged it toward Black, “the organelle looks really similar to an endoplasmic reticulum.It just has its own genetic code.”
Callum picked up the textbook and leafed through the pages before setting it aside.He knew he didn’t know enough biology to make sense of this, but he felt he should make it look like he did.
Sesi wasn’t fooled, but she wasn’t going to call him out on it.That would be pushing her luck.
