Embarrassed, Dez said, “That was kind of them.”
“Seriously,” Sophia said, “they say they’re not sure what would’ve happened if those kinds of people had gotten Kaem back to their place and tried to force him to make the stazer work. Kaem says the stazers aren’t designed to work without being hooked up to cloud computing resources. If there’s a way to make them work without being hooked up, he doesn’t know what it is.”
“Yeah,” Dez sighed, “they’d already been pretty brutal to him, just for saying he couldn’t do it.”
She and Sophia spoke a while longer, then Sophia went to visit her son again.
This left Dez sitting there wondering, Why would a stazer have to be hooked up to cloud computing resources? She puzzled over this a while, concluding that she couldn’t imagine why. I wonder, if they figured out who he was, whether the mysterious Mr. X could be forced to do it? Maybe that’s why he wants anonymity.
~~~
Sophia and Emmanuel left Dez sitting in the recliner in Kaem’s room when they went to eat breakfast in one of the hospital cafés. When they came back from their meal, they found both Kaem and Dez sound asleep. Dez looked uncomfortable with her head drooped off to one side in the chair, but she was dead to the world. Whispering, “Let them sleep,” Sophia tugged Emmanuel back out into the hall.
They sat in the tiny waiting room just down from Kaem’s room. After a minute, she turned to Emmanuel and said, “When you call work to tell them Kaem won’t be in, you should tell them Ms. Lanis will be late as well.”
Emmanuel nodded. “I’ll call at eight. There’s always someone there by then.”
“Make sure they understand how badly Kaem’s been hurt. We don’t want him to get in trouble at his job.”
He patted her arm and spoke softly, evidently intending to reassure her, “I don’t think he’ll be in trouble.”
“Why?” Sophia said hotly, surprising even herself by how her stress and anxiety had suddenly bubbled to the surface. “You think that just because those guys attacked him while trying to steal Staze’s secrets, that the company’ll cut him some slack? Do I have to remind you that big companies don’t give a damn about their employees? They view them as interchangeable parts, to be replaced if they cause problems.”
Emmanuel leaned back away from her outburst. “Well, yes,” he responded. “I do think they’ll feel bad that he got hurt because of his job. But, also—”
Sophia interrupted, “They may decide that the best way to keep him from being a problem is to fire him!”
“Sophia…” he said, sounding disappointed in her. “I know you’re upset, but barking at me isn’t going to help.”
“Sorry,” she said, rubbing at weary eyes. “But don’t try to tell me I shouldn’t worry. I still don’t have a job. If Kaem loses his, and can’t help Bana with her schooling…” she cleared a suddenly rough throat, “we’ll all be depending on your salary. I know you’re making better money than ever before, but…” She sighed.
“Sophia…” Emmanuel said, “it’s taken me a long time to realize this, but… I think Kaem’s much more important to Staze than he lets on.”
She blinked at some tears, then reached up to rub her eyes again. “Why do you say that?” she asked hopefully, then her hopes crashed around her, “I don’t have any idea how you can say that. They just demoted him from CTO!”
Softly, Emmanuel said, “I think that’s a job he didn’t want.”
“What?! Why?! It had to pay more!”
“I don’t know Sophia. What I can tell you is that the longer I’m with the company, the more I realize how everyone looks to Kaem.”
“Looks to Kaem?!”
“For answers to their questions. For how to do things. For what to do next. It’s like he’s kind of the boss even though he doesn’t have the title.”
“Maybe they just got used to asking him when he was the CTO?”
“Most of the time he was CTO, the company only had five employees. All these new people look to him too. Even Prakant, the new CTO, checks in with him all the time. I think it may be just because he’s so… smart. Because, Sophia,” Emmanuel said with a look of surprise on his face, “when they ask him, he has answers. When they show him plans, Kaem always knows how to make them better.”
“But… the real boss. The CEO, this Mr. X, he’s listening in on all Kaem’s conversations, right? Maybe it’s because everyone knows Kaem’s being fed the answers by X.”
Emmanuel shrugged. “Maybe, but when I was down at the nuclear plant, the head of it, Mr. Turpin, said I must be immensely proud of Kaem. When I said there was a lot of luck involved in the way his theory worked to predict stasis, and that Mr. X was able to make a device from his concept; Mr. Turpin seemed to think that luck didn’t have much to do with it.”
“Come on! Even Kaem says it was luck!”
With another shrug, Emmanuel said, “Mr. Turpin doesn’t think so. And… I’m starting to wonder.”
~~~
Later, when Emmanuel called Staze to let them know Kaem wouldn’t be in and that he and Ms. Lanis would be late, Ryan immediately transferred him to Arya Vaii. It was frightening to be shunted to the woman in charge of the company’s finances the one day he was late to work.
But rather than chastise him, she asked what’d happened with trembling in her voice.
When Emmanuel had only gotten a little way into his description, he heard an odd noise on the phone. He paused to listen, She’s sobbing! he thought. He said, “Um…”
Vaii cleared her throat and spoke in a raspy tone. “Where is he?”
Emmanuel gave her Kaem’s room number
