Page 233 of Ashes of Sin and Stardust

Eventually, she calmed down, staring at him with a wary expression. She began to cry.

Reuben spoke to her. I could tell he was using his calm, soothing hypnosis voice based on the expression on his face. The girl cried harder, her shoulders shaking.

Reuben removed something out of his pocket. A packet of tissues. He held one out to her. She didn’t move. Instead of approaching her, he tucked it back into the packet, and then set the packet on the floor, sliding it over to her. She took it, dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose, and slid the packet back.

He stood and took the water cup she had by her bedside that had ended up on the floor from her tantrum. He filled it with water from the small sink in the corner of the room, set it on her bedside table, and left the room.

When he left, the girl wrapped her arms around herself and sobbed. I looked away.

He came back a few minutes later, and withdrew his cell phone, handing it to the woman on the computer. She plugged it into a cable. A moment later, an audio clip of Abeni’s one-sided conversation played.

“Your microphone on your phone is amazing,” Melanie said. “Weallneed to upgrade to these.”

“I guess the phone situation was a blessing in disguise.”

“Oh, here’s Brett,” Melanie said. She answered a video call that had popped up. A young man’s face came up on the screen. Dark blue eyes glittered back at us, and his head was a mess of black curls. His face lit up with a sexy smile when he saw us, showing off a five o’clock shadow. Behind him was a room that looked similar to ours, though about seventeen-gazillion times larger and fancier, with a ton of people running around.

“Hey Brett,” Melanie said.

“Hey Mel! Oh, hey Alice!” Brett waved at me. “Nice to finally meet you.”

I smiled, waving back, not knowing who he was but trying to be polite. “Yeah, you too.”

“I’m Lindsay’s boyfriend,” he supplied.

“Oh. Got it... scary.” That woman had a boyfriend? Dang. That poor guy probably lived in a cock cage and got whipped every night.

“Uh...heh. Yeah. So, Mel. I have the clips you sent. I just emailed you the translation.”

“I’m sending you another clip now. Can you have it before dinner?”

“Yeah.”

“What can you tell me about the earlier clip?”

“It’s not perfect, but it’s enough to figure out what happened. I guess the Black girl told the Asian girl about the body farm, and said they were all going to die? From what I can understand, there’s a few words that are similar in pronunciation in their languages, and the Asian girl thought she said something about meat, pigs, and cooking? I think she thought it had something to do with cannibalism... that probably explains the panic.”

Reuben took his phone out and made a phone call. “Hey Abby. What’s for dinner tonight... no, we’ll have to change that. Can you freeze it? Okay. Do a vegetarian meal for the next few days please, and make sure it looks like vegetables. No paste, no tofu... Yeah. Thanks.” He hung up and faced us. “Lasagna is a bad idea tonight.”

I couldn’t help but choke on a laugh. Becca shot me a look of disgust, and I tried to get my reactions under control. “Sorry.”

Brett continued. “Also I had this idea, and I’ve been talking with Jared and Michael and the rest of the team... we want to get you guys upgraded.

“See, I can re-code our software so that it... well, I won’t get into the details, but if I put a microphone and a camera in each room, and upgrade your computers and your servers, and install a variation of our software, we can get you something similar to what we use, and you’ll have a running transcript ofevery conversationthat happens within the house at any given time, and it can run a side-by-side translation. You’ll need to upgrade to some pretty heavy-duty computers, and designate an air-conditioned server room, but I think it’ll make your lives easier.”

“Um,yeah, it totally will!” Melanie threw her hands up in the air in excitement. “What languages will it translate?”

“Pretty much all of them. Our system picks up languages and analyzes them from all around the world. You’ll get an update once a month. The four hours it takes to upgrade will mean a complete shutdown of the system, though, so you’ll need to plan that for a day and time when it’ll be quiet.”

“How does that even work,” Melanie asked.

“So, our system picks up all language spoken within distance of any electronic device in the world and sends it to our satellite, and then our servers for analysis. The more people who speak that language within the range of electronic devices, the more accurate the analysis, and the better translation it’ll be. The only languages you won’t get are the third-world countries and tiny places where nobody has computers or phones.”

“And you’re just now sharing this with us?” Becca said, sounding a little pissed.

“I actually broached the subject almost five years ago, but it was shut down. It wasn’t untilveryrecently that I proved I could re-code and isolate the program to be selective. We can’t give you access to the entire system because it’ll crash your place, and if you ever get audited or inspected it’s a national security risk. But... if I isolate it to just your location, which I can do now, because, satellites areamazing–”

“I know, right!” I couldn’t help the outburst.

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