“How can I help you?” he asked.
“I’m a representative of your son, Chris,” Javier said.
LeMarque’s pupils dilated massively. He looked like a cat chasing a bug. “Christopher?” he asked.
“Yes. He wants–”
“How is Christopher?”
Javier shrugged. “He’s doing well.”
LeMarque smiled slowly. “Surely you can do better than that.”
Javier resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “He’s great,” he said. “He’s a theme park designer. He’s successful. Has great taste.”
“Is he still a tight fit?”
Javier said nothing. If he were a human man, his stomach might have flipped, or his heart might have gone cold, or his pulse might have raced. But he wasn’t human, so none of those things happened. Instead, he waited for his vision to stop clouding with pixels. They danced across LeMarque’s face, rendering it safely subhuman. Yes. Subhuman. That was the word. That was the word for LeMarque. Javier opened his mouth to answer. He wanted to say he’s tighter than your ass has been in years, but even thinking of those words – of what they meant – was difficult.
It was interesting, failsafing in front of the man who had brought the failsafe into being. Interesting, and horrible. For a moment, he loved Holberton. He loved Holberton more purely than he had ever loved any other human being. It wasn’t sympathy, or pity, or even the kind of savage rage another human man might have felt in Javier’s position. It was wonder – wonder at how Holberton had survived the fucking monster sitting on the other side of the glass, how he had built a decent life, how he was still a good, kind man after springing from the rotten loins of this smiling sack of decaying flesh. Sure, Holberton was doing some things Javier didn’t like. But he was trying his best. He was trying to make things better. He was trying to do better than this asshole.
“I wouldn’t know,” Javier said simply. “I’m just an errand boy.”
“A grocery clerk,” LeMarque said, “here to collect a bill.”
Javier sensed this was a joke he was too young to get, so he just shrugged and said: “If that’s how you want to think of it. I’m here for your ring. Your son wants it back.”
“The ring he gave me? My graduation ring?”
“Yeah,” Javier said. “Something about you not deserving it, I gather. What with you being a completely selfish sack of shit, and all.”
Again, LeMarque smiled. “You tell my son he can have my ring when he pries it from my cold, dead finger.”
He lifted his right hand, and flexed his fingers. The ring twinkled there. It was a big, ugly thing. Javier guessed the old man’s eyes were going; anybody with reasonable eyesight could tell the qubit diamond was a shitty stone just by looking at it.
Javier adjusted the receiver in his hand. These phone things were total bullshit. Didn’t humans tire their necks and arms out, working with these things? He met LeMarque’s eyes again.
“That ring isn’t really yours,” he said. “It’s a reproduction. Your son wants it back.”
LeMarque held out his hand and waved his fingers again, so the ring twinkled in the humming light. “As you might have guessed, young man, I don’t really care if things are real or not.”
Now Javier did roll his eyes. “Fine. You want to know why he wants it back? Because he stored some important data in the stone, and now he needs to see it again.”
“Oh, the failsafe?” LeMarque lifted his gaze to Javier. “It’s the failsafe, isn’t it?”
Javier swallowed. “Why would you think that?”
“Because it’s the only thing important enough for my son to contact me about.” He folded his hand in his lap. He leaned forward. “Now, tell me. Why does he want it so badly? Is he going to develop it?”
“No.”
“Is he going to break it?”
“It’s a little late for that,” Javier said.
LeMarque smiled. “Yes. That’s true, isn’t it? The horse has left the barn, you could say.”
“You could say that, yeah.” Now Javier leaned forward. Like Holberton, LeMarque looked younger up close. His skin was so thin. Javier could see the shadowy blue veins in each temple. He looked like he might blow away any second. “You could also say that there’s a war coming, because the failsafe is already broken. And then you could say that I’m trying my best to stop all that, and you could make it a lot easier for me by giving me that ring.”
LeMarque smiled. “War. Hmm. War is a funny thing.” He leaned back in his chair. “You know, Javier, when we sent you that whale, I really didn’t think you’d fall for it so completely. But I guess there really is something to be said for the naiveté of machines.”
“What?”
“The whale. The puppets. They were Mitch Powell’s idea, but he asked for my blessing. I thought they would be significant enough to get the Coast Guard looking for local experts. And lo, unto them was Mitch delivered.”