June 24
“And I bet you found something we can use,” Katherine said. “Excellent. Let’s hear it.”
“I think Rob is completely cut off from us as of right now,” Phillip said. The stunned silence was almost too much to bear. “I mean, there’s no… I can’t… It’s just… impossible.”
“Please explain,” Daniel said.
“Alex has… an unpredictable streak,” Phillip said. “From what I can tell, it seems to be centered around his son’s intelligence. Either he’s afraid of Rob being smarter than him, or…”
“Or he knows that Rob is smarter than him,” Katherine said, slowly, “and he’s doing everything he can to cut him down to size. Dammit.”
“Something like that,” Phillip admitted weakly. “It just seems like Alex is trying his hardest to prevent Rob from learning. It’s like he changes the rules on Rob every so often, without telling him.”
“This is troubling,” Daniel said. Phillip was unnerved even more by the slightly lowering note in Daniel’s voice. “I wonder if it is too late.”
“Too late?” Chloe asked. “What do you mean?”
“That is to say,” Daniel said, “I wonder if perhaps the… work, for lack of a better word, of Mister MacKenzie has damaged Rob beyond repair.”
“You sound like you’re talking about a machine,” Phillip spat.
“He’s not far off,” Katherine sighed. “If Alex was screwing around with how Rob reacts, it could change his readings on the tests. We’d have to rerun our analyses with a different psych baseline.”
“The end result being that Rob may not have been suitable for Twilight Wings from the very beginning,” Chloe said. “We have failed.”
“Not yet, we haven’t,” Phillip said. “Kath, just how much variance could this really introduce? I mean, most of these tests are pretty objective, aren’t they?”
“That’s true on some level,” Katherine said, “but many of the most critical ones rely on an accurate foreknowledge of the subject’s mental state and psychological blocks or known reactions. Think of it like a scale. You have to know where zero is, or the number you get off of it is meaningless.”
“Only, in this case, there are an infinite number of unknown zeroes,” Daniel said. “This complicates matters to too great a degree for my liking.”
“We should proceed with our plans for dissolution,” Chloe said.
“I object,” Daniel said. “We are not in that much danger yet.”
“We very well could be,” Katherine said. “We have no Twilight Wings, we have no more funding, we have no data. We are finished, Daniel!”
“We are not,” Daniel said. “I believe that, with the right steps, this situation may be salvaged, for certain degrees of survivability already decided to be acceptable. We can still execute Plan C, Miss Reed.”
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