Dana pointed silently to a bare wall along one side of the little kitchenette. “There would be good, I guess,” she mumbled. Danson followed with another two, then McGhee with more, until forty-eight boxes were stacked. McGhee brought in the final box and attempted to slide it, curling style, toward the others. He misjudged some (or perhaps it was planned) and the box, dropped from too high a height, hit the floor and cracked open, spilling hundreds of documents onto the kitchen floor.
“Sorry, kid,” Danson said, watching the papers slide from one end of the kitchen to the other. “Anyway, see you in court Tuesday.” Judge Mordecai had given them Monday off so Dana would have an extra day to review the documents. With more chuckles and laughter, the two turned around to leave. Bam-Bam lost it. He stood up and placed his huge front paws on Danson’s shoulders. His lugubrious face was inches from Danson’s. With a low bark, Bam-Bam pushed Danson forward, causing him to tumble to the floor. Bam-Bam stopped and looked at Dana. Dana knew that if she gave a thumbs-down, Danson would shortly be coding at the nearest trauma unit.
Danson, not appreciating his perilous situation, snarled like a cornered little dog. “That was deliberate, you bitch. Mordecai will hear of this on Tuesday morning.”
“Sorry, Mr. Danson,” Dana snapped. “You came here with disrespect. Bam-Bam does not like that. You come at me and you’re liable to lose an arm or leg. Now get out of my house.”
They did, and she gave Bam-Bam a large hug, and then an even larger bone. “Thank you, puppy, for helping me out.” She knew, just absolutely knew, that the Saint Bernard understood her.
Dana was as close to tears as she had ever been. She sat, despondent and helpless, facing a stack of forty-nine bankers boxes, totally crammed with documents. Each box must have contained at least a thousand pages, double sided. Chris was sitting beside her, sharing her angst. An equally distressed Bam-Bam lay on the floor, head resting on his forepaws, trying to sort out how he could help. Chris had repackaged the documents in the split box, and added it to the pile.
“How am I going to read and organize that? In three days?”
“You’re a fast reader, hon. And you’re not afraid of long hours,” Chris said, trying to sound encouraging. “You climb a mountain one step at a time.”
“It’s not the reading of them. I have to add them to my database. They all need to be summarized. Scanned. Indexed. Reviewed for issue relevance. Dates need to be figured out. I can go fast, ten minutes a document, so if I worked twenty-four hours a day, I’d have it finished by sometime next year.”
They both sat on the floor along the opposite wall, looking at the mountain. “Damn, I should’ve picked medical school,” said Dana for the twentieth time. Chris nodded but did not respond. The three sat, depressed and despairing.
“What about those weird emails that you’ve been getting, Dana? From this Lord Deathrot—this Turbee person. If he is who he says he is, he might be able to help.”
“Nothing to lose, I guess. I spoke to him yesterday. I’ll Skype him.” She clicked on an icon on her screen and, within seconds, a cryptic interface appeared showing the little Trojan warrior, all helmet and feet, with “Lord Shatterer of Deathrot” blinking on and off below it. The graphic faded, and an image of Turbee coalesced on the screen. He had dirty blond hair, thick glasses, and sprinkles of beard popping out here and there. He was wearing a shirt bearing a large, obtrusive coffee stain.
“Hi, Dana. This is me, Hamilton Turbee. What do you need?”
“I don’t know if you can help. But those prosecutors just dropped a hundred thousand documents on me, and I can’t possibly enter them into my database in the next three days. Could you help?”
“I might be able to. Do you have a high-power industrial scanner?”
Dana paused. “There are a couple at Blankstein deFijter. We could use those.”
“You database all your documents, don’t you?” Turbee asked.
“Yes, I do. It’s the one advantage I think I have over the other guys. I can find and retrieve information much faster than they can.”
“And in addition to the database, you have search software?”
“Yes I do. It indexes everything and goes through the database with blinding speed.”
“Okay, Dana. Your problem is really simple. All you need to do is add a hundred thousand pages to your database.”
“You don’t say, Turbee. That’s all I need to do. Simple little exercise.”
“Actually, Dana, it is a simple exercise. It’s just that there are a lot of pages. Or at least you think there are.”
“Well, Mr. Smarty-Pants, what do you think?”
“Dana, this is what TTIC was designed to do. We add thousands of databases to our indexing system every day. If there is a new store chain opening up in Indonesia, and they process sales centrally in any way, we have it.”
“Oh. Big Brother. Wow.”
“I don’t think we’re related, but thanks for the compliment. Anyway, the AI algorithms, the technology for doing all of this, was engineered by large teams of software and even hardware engineers, but George designed a lot of the hardware, and I designed a lot of the software. I can index this for you. In fact, it’s probably easier because we already have, like, petabytes of info on the Colorado River attack. Our search engines are AI driven and the software will likely recognize all of the specific nouns in your forty-nine boxes.”
It never occurred to Turbee that to share government resources of this nature, in this fashion, would have earned most people a lifetime ticket in Fort Leavenworth, but his mind didn’t work that way.
“Oh, and also email your existing database to me,” he added. “I need to know how you’ve structured it.”
“Sure, Turbee,” Dana replied. “We can load this stuff up into Chris’s van and take it downtown and scan the
