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Birthday
Hunt Residence
Carmen arrived at the Hunt residence a
little before
Carmen said, “They’re still following
me. Do you think they’ll inspect the
house?”
Aaron nodded no, “They want Jared and
Michelle. By now they’ve already checked
for heat signatures and came up with only us, so they’re hoping we’ll lead them
to the Millers or that the Millers will show up here.”
Carmen asked, “Heat signatures? If they check for our heat signatures how come
they don’t notice when we disappear
down here?”
Sarah explained, “Well, that’s one of the
neat things about this house. First,
they can’t check for heat signatures in the living room without either being on
our property or flying above us. It’s
because the land curves up just enough to hide that part of the house. However, since they could cross the property
lines we have a heater in the living room that makes the heat sensors basically
worthless.”
Carmen asked, “Couldn’t they think we are
hiding the Millers in that room?”
Keith said, “No, we only have them on if
some of us are underground.”
Carmen nodded, “Pretty cool.”
They finally arrived at the dining
room. They all said their hellos. Aaron got out some plates and napkins and
everybody got some pizza.
Aaron started with an announcement, “I
have found some land north of
Keith asked, “What’s a canton?”
Aaron said, “It’s kind of like a state,
but a little smaller. It’s also more
self-governed than a
Carmen said, “So they’re German speaking?”
Aaron said, “Yes, but let’s not worry
about the details until after I see the land.
So that’s my progress report.”
Sarah said, “I think I’ve found our
architect! Samuel Lyles has done some
work for us in other states, has three children, and his wife is a medical
doctor!”
Aaron nodded, “Yes, Samuel would be a good
choice. From what I remember, they said
they might try to move out of the
Sarah said, “Yes, that’s their plan.”
Aaron agreed, “Sounds good to me. Now we need to decide how to contact them.”
Jared said, “Can you invite them here?”
Sarah replied, “We could, but they live in
Michelle asked, “Would the conference be
secure?”
Sarah explained, “Yes. We have extra encryption, and the origins of
the signals are displaced by some landlines and wireless signals. I’ll try to get them to visit early next
week.”
Jared said, “Well, I guess that brings us
to me. I’m making slow progress. Most of what I’m doing right now is designing
a storage system for all the data.”
Michelle was next and said, “I’ve got a
good list of resources for the sixth grade.
I’ll start on the fifth grade in a few days.”
Keith went next. “OK, so far I’ve been looking at how the
Biosphere 2 Center looks. In different
isolated sections, it has lowland and highland rainforest, an ocean and beach,
a marsh, a low and high land desert, a savanna, a forest, a lung, and the human
habitat.
“Personally, I think the lung is the most
interesting part. It’s a large bladder
or pressure regulator. As the heat and
air pressure increase, the lung expands to relieve the air pressure, if the
heat and air pressure decrease, the lung contracts. We should have something like this if we
isolate our air supply from the rest of the world.
“The savanna is also interesting because
it was used to transition from desert to rainforest. Most of the vegetation was grass and
trees. Inside were birds that lived off
the fruit and seeds the plants provided.
“The ocean simulated a
“Most of the other sections were rather
bland. The forest, for example, mostly
had cottonwood trees. An important note
is that they used the facility to do various research projects. Much of the research related to CO2
levels. So while it was a failure in the
large goal of making a sustainable biosphere, they were almost doomed to
failure due to the amount of other tests they preformed.”
Carmen was impressed with his thoroughness,
“Cool, good job.”
Keith smiled in reply.
Aaron said, “OK, I guess that’s
everything. Let’s meet again when we can
talk to Samuel and hopefully his wife.”
Everybody agreed. They continued eating pizza and drinking soda
or coffee.
Michelle said to Carmen, “This is good
pizza!”
Carmen said, “It didn’t used to be. Well, it’s always tasted good; it’s just that
until recently the kitchen didn’t have much in the way of health standards.”
Jared asked, “What changed?”
Carmen explained, “Well, back when Keith
worked there Tony was still alive. Tony
was a great guy; he just didn’t do much cleaning. When he died, his brother Jake inherited the
place. Jake cleaned the place up and
really made it great.”
Keith said, “The floors were always a
mess. The pizza knife was rusty because
it wasn’t kept clean.”
Carmen nodded in agreement.
Michelle, “So why did you both work there?”
Keith shrugged, “I needed a job. There really weren’t many other jobs.”
Carmen said, “It sounds like a cliché, but
I started for the money and I stayed for the friends. They were almost like a family to me,
especially Tony. I was really upset when
he died. Jake’s good, too, though. He’s not as caring, but he knows how to run a
business . . . and how to clean!”
Jared said, “I think I’m going to make a
file for each thing we deconstruct. We
can keep the software simple by just having it make the file, load the file,
and replicate the structure in the file.”
Carmen said, “Sounds good to me. What type of file format?
Jared replied, “Well, I think it should be
encrypted. At some point there may be
people in the community,” he coughed to pretend to hide the word hacker, “Who
we may want to keep out, especially for files of, say, weapons and other
dangerous things. Besides that, the
native random access file structure of the language should do the trick. That way I don’t have to re-invent anything.”
Carmen said, “So really this could be
working in twenty hours of programming.”
Jared shrugged, “It’s hard to say. Maybe a professional could do it that
quickly. I might take triple that.”
Keith said, “That’s still great. If you two can get it working in a week we’ll
have a ton of time to start making files.”
After everybody finished eating, Michelle
went into the kitchen. She was there for
a few minutes and then came out with an ice cream cake with 17 burning candles
on it. Michelle said, “A little bird
told me it’s your birthday, Carmen, so I made this cake for you!”
Everybody sang “Happy Birthday” to
Carmen. When they were done she blew out
the candles and made a wish. With all
the time she had spent with them and all the love they had shown her, she
wished that the Millers were her family.
“Thank you so much! This is my favorite kind of cake!” She hugged Michelle. She looked at Keith and asked, “Did you tell
them.”
He nodded.
She walked over to him, hugged him, and gave him a kiss on his left
cheek.
“Thank you all so much. Most of my birthdays were forgotten until I
worked at Tony’s Pizza. Since Tony died,
I didn’t think anybody would remember this year. This really means a lot to me. Thank you.”
Michelle said, “You’re welcome. We would have done more, but it’s rather
tough to shop when you’re a fugitive!”
They all ate cake. It was very good, homemade strawberry ice-cream cake. Everybody continued to talk until it started getting late. Then everybody said good-bye to the Millers and went back to the house. Carmen went home and had her usual CTF tail behind her the whole way.
Copyright (C) 1998-2001 East Coast Games, Inc. and 2001 - 2006 Forest J. Handford
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