Unstable Prototypes Read Online Free

head above water and allow him to start chiseling away at
his massive debt.
    "You know the office likes me to use their
vendors."
    "You could always convince them to make me a vendor."
    "Don't start," she said, making a face. "I'll
be back in a couple of weeks. I'll see you then. I just didn't want
to leave you hanging." She gave him a hug and a peck on the cheek.
"I'll miss you."
    "Me too. You better show up next time, babe,"
he said.
    "Cross my heart. And goodbye to you, Squee,
sweetie," she said, with a blown kiss and a wink, her trademark
send off.
    Ma looked up from the food to deliver three
quick yips again before continuing her meal. Lex leaned out the
doorway and watched her go, a faint smile on his face. When the
elevator doors shut behind her, he stepped inside and closed the
door. He flopped down on the futon.
    "She seemed nice," Ma remarked. "And your
apartment, also, is very nice. The weather is lovely today. How
have things been regarding your employment?"
    "Seriously Ma? Small talk? You're a
supercomputer walking around as an adorable little fuzzball and you
are attempting small talk."
    "I am endeavoring to put you at ease with
what I understand is a difficult situation."
    "It isn't working," he said, pinching the
bridge of his nose.
    "That is unfortunate."
    She finished eating the contents of the bowl,
industriously licked it clean, and tapped over to his feet.
    "So what possible reason could you have for
coming out here like this?"
    "Karter has been kidnapped."
    "What?! By who?"
    "I am not certain of the organization, but I
have my suspicions that it is a group of political extremists. They
wanted to contract him for the construction of a potentially
destructive device, and during a scale demonstration of an existing
product, they deployed electromagnetic pulse generators to
incapacitate me and his other automated defenses. When I was able
to restore myself to limited functionality, they were gone."
    "Why would they kidnap him? Do you think
they're going to force him to build weapons for them?"
    "You know Karter as well as I. It is entirely
possible that they will not need to force him."
    "Yeah..."
    Karteroketraskin "Karter" Dee, was many
things. He was a brilliant engineer and a gifted inventor. He was
also, proudly, a borderline sociopath with little use for morals
and even less use for most of the human race. Though he had helped
to prevent a multi-planet catastrophe by lending apparatus and
research, he only did so first out of spite, then out of
self-interest. The opportunity to field test his experimental
equipment is, in his eyes, justification enough to do virtually
anything. In the brief time that Lex had known him, he had seen the
man use weapons-grade lasers as a pooper-scooper and a miniature
black hole as a projectile. He'd already had a predilection for
creating weapons of mass destruction... And now he might be in the
hands of a terrorist group.
    "Do you understand why I was willing to take
such drastic action?"
    "Well, yeah, but why me? This is a job for
the military or one of those bureaus of investigation."
    "The initial contact with these individuals
was arranged through military channels, implying that the military
may have been compromised by the group. Furthermore, Karter is,
himself, somewhat sought after by a number of military and domestic
agencies. My goal is to liberate him, not to deliver him from one
form of imprisonment to another. Thus, this is a matter that calls
for discretion. You are, to be perfectly frank, one of the few
people that I feel we can trust."
    "There has got to be someone better for-"
    "Lex, I had anticipated your reluctance, and
as such had allotted three days in which to convince you in a
gradual and logical manner. Unfortunately I had underestimated the
difficulty of traversing interstellar distances as an unaccompanied
non-verbal quadruped, and thus was delayed. For this reason, I will
distill the situation to its purest form. Karter has got the
knowledge,