While Kyle had his tongue in Jeffery's mouth, hundreds of miles away in the American Heartland, inside the unassuming and unremarkable walls of a rather run-down factory building, two men watched several screens quietly. Where the outside of the building was practically falling apart, what it hid inside was an ultra-modern, state-of-the-art TransDem Labs monitoring facility. The first man, Doctor Henry Worthington, scratched his chin, glancing over at his colleage, Doctor Andrew Chen. Worthington coughed, turned over the matchbook in his hand, idly looking at the local bar's logo where he'd gotten it, and mumbled something beneath his breath.
"What was that, Henry?" Chen asked his partner.
"I said, he's the first test subject to find the back door."
"Back door?" Chen asked. "I wasn't aware of any back door, just the expanded emergency features that aren't due out til the next build, along with the new preview features."
"Yes. I know," Worthington mumbled. "That makes him all the more impressive."
"Why wasn't I told about this?" Chen asked, the tone and volume of his voice suggesting he had already gotten his hackles up, but that he wasn't surprised by his partner's words.
"That's not the point, Andrew," Worthington responded in irritation. Chen had such a fragile ego, if the man wasn't as brilliant as he was fragile, they'd have parted company long ago. "The point is," Worthington continued evenly, "This kid seems to have a natural aptitude for technology - one that none of our reports on him gave any inkling of."
"What I don't understand is why he hasn't reverted yet." Both men turned with a start, to see a tall, handsome dark haired woman in her 40s stroll casually into the room. Mariam Gupta was well connected in industrial and technological circles, and had gotten the project a formidable amount of funding. But she wasn't a scientist, and the subtleties of programming escaped her.
"The Chronivac transmitter focuses on the subject," Chen explained for the umpteenth time. "All changes hinge on -"
"- On the subject the transmitter is locked into, and changes can't revert unless the subject is within 20 feet of the transmitter," Gupta interrupted, "Yes, I remember now. So he must be more than 20 feet from the transmitter since the save button hasn't been pushed a second time and yet he still hasn't reverted."
"Exactly," Worthington asserted.
"Not much of a failsafe feature if you have to be within 20 feet for it to revert you back," Gupta retorted.
"Agreed," Worthington sighed. "It can reshuffle and change reality - working out from the subject, even changing the entire world and probably beyond, to accomodate changes made to the subject... but get them more than 20 feet away, and everything stays locked in the current status, until the subject re-enters the transmitter's range."
"It's a problem, to be sure," Chen conceded.
"A damned dangerous and embarrasing one," Worthington grumped. "We have three teams working on just that one problem, and so far no luck." Worthington eyed the gay boy on the main screen, still tonging his boyfriend.
"What I don't understand is how test subject 098 was able to enter a new profile into the remote when you need a computer to do that," Gupta said, puzzling.
"Yes," Worthington responded thoughtfully. "He found a back door... but I still don't know how he could so eptly manipulate the profile cross-leaking bug to create an all new profile... he seems to be able to utilize the device better without any directions than our teams of technicians and programmers with all our resources at their disposal."
Maybe he's just a natural, a computer prodigy." Chen.
"Maybe he could fix your little transmitter/subject distance problem." Gupta this time.
"Yes," Worthington's eyes narrowed, watching the two teens on the main screen runnig inside the house giggling. "He bears watching."
"Better have Updates lock the perminent save features on his transmitter so he doesn't end up irreversibly lobotomizing himself into a mindless sex pig." Gupta watched the two gay boys running around the couch after one another in mindless fun. "He won't be much use to us then."
"Indeed."