- 2052 -

It's a quirk of Hugh's that he refuses to meet in any building taller than a single storey.

Consultation with one of the premier members of European intelligence is worth the accommodation, though it's something of a challenge to find an appropriate single storey building in Manhattan. Still, Jeff's managed to turn up a gorgeous little diner, the sort that he's sorry he hasn't found sooner. It's a relic of century old art deco, beautifully kept up, all stainless steel, black and white enamel, and strong, clean lines.

The menu's is probably a little low-brow for Lord Creighton-Ward's tastes, but a burger and fries never did anyone without a heart condition any harm, in Jeff Tracy's opinion.

Anyway, Hugh's only ordered a cup of tea.

After the manner of the American government as concerns visiting diplomats, Jeff's own bodyguard is pulling double-duty, and Hugh's sent his own man on with his daughter, down to Boston for the day. Kyrano's at the next table over with a cup of black coffee and a full view of the rest of the diner and it's late morning patrons, while Jeff eases his way towards making a proposition.

They're still in the shallow waters of polite smalltalk and Jeff's mentally reviewing the usual checklist. Weather's been remarked upon. They have no sports in common. If this were a social engagement and not a business meeting, work would get a passing mention, but instead the next conversational marker is meant to be family.

"How's Penelope finding Oxford?"

Lord Hugh smiles ever so slightly and for the first time there's a warm light in his pale grey eyes. "Considerably less agreeable than Oxford is finding Penelope, by all accounts. Her marks are more than satisfactory, but she carries on to an unflattering length about the stodginess of it all." Social equilibrium demands an equal and opposite response and after a swallow of tea, Hugh questions, "And John? I believe at one point you'd mentioned he was pursuing a dual doctorate."

Hugh might just sound impressed by the fact, and as well he should be. Jeff nods, smiles, and there's a brief puff of pride in his chest, "Computer Science and Astrophysics."

"Congratulations to him."

"He had to talk me into letting him do both at the same time. By now I thought he'd have settled down a little bit, but, no, still just as excited as the day he enrolled." Jeff chuckles, "If Penelope feels the need to slap him by the end of today, I won't fault her for it."

"I imagine Parker would intervene before it came to that."

It's not clear if Hugh's missed the joke or just chosen to ignore it. There was a point in time when Jeff would have considered the former to be a stark impossibility, but then in the time since that's been true, Hugh's become the sort of person who refuses to meet in buildings taller than a single story.

Beside Hugh's white teacup is a little stainless steel pot of hot water, plain black tea steeping stronger and stronger. It somehow seems as though it sets a time limit on the conversation, a pot of tea slowly growing cold and bitter, that it'll soon be undrinkable, an untenable waste, if Jeff doesn't get to his point sooner than later.

So he clears his throat and goes straight into it, the reason for this one-storey meeting. "I've been approached by the GDF. They're looking to contract a private entity to help develop solutions to some of the problems presented by global peacekeeping. I've told them I'll consider it, because I'd hoped for some of your input, first and foremost."

Jeff's brought a dossier of information regarding the project in question, and Kyrano turns up at his elbow, hands it over to the Lord Creighton-Ward, who accepts it with a brief glance at the cover of the file.

As the other man begins to page through the dossier, Jeff tucks into a BLT, though the B's been swapped for slices of avocado. His fiftieth birthday had been an occasion on which he'd been told to have an eye on his sodium intake, and the warning still has enough of an edge that he still occasionally remembers to hold to it. He watches Hugh as he reads, his eyes drifting quickly down each page, turning several sections forward, then doubling back, rereading.

"It's ambitious," the Englishman concludes, as he snaps the folder closed and sets it back on the table, pins it there with his fingertips. For the first time since their informal meeting had begun, Hugh looks up with something like interest, fixes Jeff with a pointed stare, "Are you the first person they've approached?"

"I think I'm fixed to be the only person they approach. It's a very specific sort of idea they've got in mind. I imagine it's a proposal that's been in bureaucratic hell since the end of the war—taking it to an external contractor might be the only hope they have of actually getting it accomplished."

They're both still talking sideways about the project, it's too early for the details. Hugh will have read between the lines, will have picked up on the sorts of things that cause a man like Jeff Tracy to hesitate, to opt for caution. "I suppose it would do an immense amount of good, if it could be done."

Jeff shrugs. "The way I see it, it would be more like undoing a great deal of harm."

"Do you think it's possible?"

"I think from a technological standpoint, it'll take a few years of R&D to devise a workable solution, and then a further few years to actually implement, but that's never something I've considered an obstacle."

"You're worried about the politics."

"We're talking about a literal minefield. I'm more than a little worried about the politics."

Hugh has long, aristocratic fingers and manicured nails. The pair of them are both widowers, a sad fact to have in common. Jeff's moved his wedding band to his right hand. Hugh's remains fixed on the left. He still pins the dossier to the table, though it makes the tremor in his hand that much more obvious. "Demining is a noble goal. God knows orbital shipping lanes are fraught with ordnance. Every year there's a call for an innovative solution. Frankly I'm surprised you haven't stepped up before."

Jeff coughs. "Generally it's done with the consent of sovereign nations. I'm not sure that's going to be the case, here. It's a GDF initiative. Those can be—dubiously sanctioned."

"Mm."

Jeff clears his throat and glances to Kyrano. He nods back. His head of security has taken a visual inventory of the other patrons and though it's still early days and unlikely that anyone's listening in, but it can't hurt to be too careful. Jeff's voice remains low as he continues, "—and I think they might be leading up to something—broader. I want at least an educated guess as to what's on the other side of the fence, before I go sticking my hands through the gaps."

This statement is what flattens Hugh's palm onto the top of the dossier, has him pull it across the table and take it in hand. There are lines to be read between, conclusions to be drawn. Hugh's retired, but his contacts in the GDF are still far more robust than Jeff's are, even now. "I'll look into it."

If what's been proposed is possible, it's likely to be one of the single broadest strokes of humanitarian effort ever achieved. The unilateral disarmament of low-earth orbit in the wake of a war of proliferation is an achievement on par with the global distribution of the vaccine for malaria.

Jeff's not even sixty, yet. It'd be a hell of a thing to be the man who did both.

"Don't you ever get lonely out there, John?"

Alan's a prototype, sitting at the end of John's bed, fuzzy and blue and still in his rocket ship pajamas, off on the other side of the world. It had been a gift from Dad, brand new tech holographic tech he's been given, to trial before committing to for his latest project. Alan's got the other one, the other disc shaped holocomm, with the words LightType in raised white print on the rim. There's a bowl of neon blue milk on the floor in front of him, and it'd be blue even in person, because Alan's apparently capable of fueling a meaningful existence on a diet that consists of corn syrup and food dye, mushed up in soy milk.

It's the Island's morning. It's John's should-be-dinnertime-but-just-have-to-finish-this-paper. He's hit a stalling point, a tricky run of paragraphs that he just wrote, tapped out quickly and easily and without deep or serious thought. This is a trap he falls into a little too often—fingers that type at rate of a hundred and four words a minute and are connected to a brain like his sometimes get a little too enthusiastic.

So there's maybe three hundred words that got skittered onto the page without actual due thought, because the subject matter is rich, he's well-informed in it, and his opinions have gone and bled into his facts. A quick burst of keystrokes like gunfire across his mechanical keyboard, and these are gone, ruthlessly excised, until he's ready to pay proper attention. John rubs his eyes. Needs to break the rhythm and double back to it with a fresh line of thought.

Good a time as any to pay attention to Alan, who's been waiting patiently for his answer. "Did Grandma tell you to ask?"

"No."

"Really?"

"Nnnnooo. Nope." Alan's eleven and tiny and he kicks his feet when he's lying. Alan's still a little too young to be tremendously concerned about the fact that he's still tiny, and isn't aware that his three oldest siblings have a pool between them about whether or not he's going to shoot straight up, like John and Scott, or broaden out across the shoulders like Virgil, Gordon and Dad. Lying on his stomach on the floor, with his chin in his hands and his attention divided between John's comm and whatever Saturday morning nonsense he's into lately, his bare feet are crossed at the ankles, and still. "Just wondered."

Not actually that far out of the realm of possibility, that this is the sort of thing that Alan would've just wondered. There's an improbable streak of protectiveness that runs through the baby of the family, something that seems to have started to crop up right around the time his brothers started making themselves absent. Scotty off in the air force, John, straight to MIT, practically still in his cap and gown from high school. Virg, looking at apartments in Denver. Gordon, and his apparent decision to try and grow gills by sheer force of will, even if he has to live in the pool to make it happen. John folds up his laptop, reaches out to pull the little hologram display into his lap. "Are you worried about me?" he asks, instead of answering.

"Kinda."

Good ol' Alan. John grins at him. "Well, but I'm okay, though. Right, bud?"

"Mmyeah. You say so." Alan rubs at his freckled nose, and reaches over to pause whatever he's watching. Must really be concerned. He rests his chin back on his hands and squints at his older brother. "Really, though?"

"Yeah. Hey, you know what, I even made a friend today. Brings my total up to like, four."

"Grandma says brothers don't count, 'cuz brothers have to be friends."

That's the sort of thing that Grandma would say. John disagrees, but privately, where Grandma can't argue with him about it. "Two and a half, then."

Alan's brow furrows mentally doing the math and trying to figure out just who that number comprises. "Who?"

"Dad had a meeting with her father at the Manhattan office, her name's Penelope. Uh, Lady Creighton-Ward, I guess, technically. I don't know, all that English nobility stuff is hard to sort out. She was nice. I have her email. We walked around the campus all day, showed her all the good labs, introduced her to some of my profs." The day's a bit of a blur, actually. If social energy can be considered a currency, it's possible John's gotten a little overdrawn, what with a whole day in the company of someone who'd started out a stranger.

The highlight of the day (and the point at which John had realized he'd actually made a friend) had been a two hour period spent sitting on a bench in the middle of the quad, talking about the piece of modern art crossed with high-encryption server tech that made up the centerpiece. It's a shifting, mutable piece of kinetic sculpture, covered in tiny LCD tiles, an impossibly complex and ever changing monument to code and cryptography, programming languages and pure math. John had pulled out a tablet and showed her how to log on to the thing, and the ways that the various elements and interfaces could be altered and interacted with. He'd pulled up video of the way the installation had suddenly turned a bright, alarming shade of red on 10/24/2048 and pulsed out a ciphered message in Morse code. He spares Alan a complete recap and just says, "We talked about cryptography for like two hours over lunch, that was pretty cool."

"That's good. Are you gonna email her?"

Probably not, but it's possible. "Sure, maybe."

"You should email her, if you're gonna be friends. What's she like?"

One of these days John's going to sit Alan down and really explain what the deal is with introverts, and how sometimes people can learn to enjoy their own company, and how much more room there is in the day when one doesn't feel the need to fill that time with other people. "She's nice. Virgil's age. She's going to school in England, Oxford. Umm. She had a bodyguard."

Alan's eyes widen, as though their father doesn't have his own bodyguard, and for the moment he's far more interested in bodyguards than he is in nice girls. "Really? Were they cool?"

John chuckles. "I guess he was, yeah. Older guy. Umm, maybe a couple years older than Dad. His name was Parker."

"Did he have an earpiece thing? Did he have a bulletproof vest? Did he frisk you? Did he have a gun?"

"Yes, couldn't tell, no, and probably not, concealed carry is illegal in Massachusetts."

"Aw."

John rolls his eyes, but fondly. "Yeah, I was real disappointed. Didn't even tackle me when I went to shake hands. Was kind of hoping to be tasered."

Alan rolls his eyes and scoffs, but with a grin of his own. It's only recently that Alan's really started to get John's jokes, subtler than Gordon's, funnier than Dad's and usually seeded deeply into serious conversations. "Why's she need a bodyguard, you think?"

He hadn't, actually, given it a great deal of thought. "I don't know. Same reasons dad does, I guess."

"Hmm."

"Hmm yourself."

There's unconcealed hope in Alan's eyes when he asks, "Is she gonna be your girlfriend?"

Oh, Alan. Though this is actually Scott's fault, for having had a high school girlfriend who Alan had been in absolute adoration of. He hadn't spoken to Scott for a week after he'd broken up with her, about a month before his high school graduation. "Nah, Allie." And then, changing the subject before they can go wandering down this particular well-worn track. "Oh hey, you wanna do me a favour?"

Alan's been pathologically helpful since he was four years old, and this perks him right up, saves him from the abyss of despair that goes along with his latent mourning for Laura Kelvin, who's gone on to be barefoot and pregnant somewhere in Kansas, last John heard. "Yeah."

It's actually why he'd called Alan in the first place, but they'd chattered at each other for a while and then just spent a while sort of half-talking, enjoying each other's telepresence. But really what John had wanted to call about was a fairly simple favour.

"There's an old laptop in my room. I need you to boot it up and find a file for me. I've got this old game program I wrote when I was your age and it's been on my mind lately. Mind helping me out, Al?"

His little brother scrambles onto his knees and mocks a salute. "Sure thing, John. I gotcha covered. What's it called?"

" . Thanks, Allie."