Page 80 of Forced Proximity
She placed the pot she was washing back into the sink, left the water running, then turned to cup my face with soapy hands. “You should go see a doctor and get some sleep medicine.” She turned to Chevy. “Can you write a script for him so he doesn’t have to go in?”
Chevy’s eyes came to me, took in the soapsuds that I could feel clinging to my beard, and winked. “Sure.”
She nodded once before picking up the dish towel she had hanging over her shoulder and wiping my face off. “Your food is in the microwave.”
I dropped a kiss to her forehead, then went and claimed my food.
I also kicked Copper out of my seat at the head of the table and dug into my food.
“What’s the plan for today?”
I ignored them, not wanting to think about later tonight at all. At least not until I got all my food down. The moment I started to think about everything, the harder it would be to swallow.
“Or we could talk about the news of the plane crash making a media firestorm.” Dru quickly changed the topic, likely sensing the tenseness in my entire body just by glancing at me. “Finnian, did you know that there were two senators on that plane with you?”
I took a quick bite of toast and then pulled out my phone.
“I looked up the manifest because I was curious,” I said between bites. “Two senators, quite a few lobbyists, and several family members of politicians. The DFW flight was a layover to other cities as well. There was also a high school wrestling team on the flight.”
“They hadn’t shared that yet,” Dru hissed in a breath. “Oh my god. How awful.”
“No other survivors were found?” Webber asked.
“None.” I paused. “Other than the baby.”
“Which is another huge controversy.” Dru dried her hands off and picked up a newspaper I hadn’t seen until now. “Concerned father of newborn Mark Paul Renard begging volunteers to help him find his son.”
She walked the paper over to me and laid it on the table between Doc and me.
Doc took a sip of his coffee before saying, “Isn’t that sweet. He’s actually acting like he’s the caring husband. Devastated that his wife was killed in a freak accident. But he still hopes to find the remains of his son.”
“There are over three hundred people missing from that tornado,” I mused. “There’s damn well no way to know if the kid’s even in the same area anymore. If the plane had been the only thing to happen, that’s one thing. But then that tornado came through right after we’d crashed, and they’re finding debris from the plane ten miles away.”
“They found a cow that was on a farm near y’all on top of a house in the next county over,” Cutter said as he turned his phone around.
“That’s AI,” I said.
“Fake,” Doc agreed.
“I’d have said the same, but literally look.” Cutter zoomed in. “You can see all the gashes all over this cow.”
“How can you tell if it’s AI or not?” Dru asked.
I hooked her around the hip and guided her to sit in my lap.
She leaned against me stiffly for a few seconds before I patted her belly and whispered, “Relax.”
She snorted, but she did relax.
“Artificial intelligence is getting really good,” I said. “But if you look closely, you can see that it’s just a little bit too glitchy here.”
I showed her where the AI came into effect, and she shook her head. “That’s insane.”
“That’s the worst,” Chevy noted. “All these new medical students coming in are literally building their foundations on AI. They have no fuckin’ clue about half the shit that they should because they’re having the computers answer their test questions for them. Let alone writing notes and studying with whatever AI gives them.”
“Guess it’s good that they still have to pass the exam to make them a physician,” Doc said. “I volunteered at the National Registry Exam this past weekend to help with getting new paramedics their wings, and nearly half of them couldn’t pass it. The hands on was even funnier because it was like they drew a blank. Without some computer to give them the answer, they had no clue. Over sixty percent failed.”
“Good riddance,” Cutter muttered. “I don’t want anyone that doesn’t know what they’re doing working on my wife or my kids.”
