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Click here to read part 1 if you missed it

Back at the nail salon

“Still with me Amber?” Jon asked.

She shook her head in agreement and, “mmhmm,’d” as she worked on filing his nails, but damn his stories were long.

“You’re such a great listener Amber.”

Jon Continued his story…

So I finished getting ready, packed my Travel Bag, then had Anna Iris set course for 2142, the year Sally Mae called me. The machine let out a ‘sigh of relief’ notification signaling that the time Traveling was complete, I then left the office and walked out to the drone Sally Mae had sent me waiting in the helispace out in the helilot.

Drones may be the fastest way to travel, but man do I hate flying in those things, this one was better than most though, it was a classic, well, back then it was brand new, but those versions were so nice, all white leather seats, a food replicator on demand inside a glass pod, just classy. The only downside, and it was a big downside, was that the holo-ad playing kept trying to chat me up, and wouldn’t stop dropping lines about:

“Puff Pearls the worlds most comfortable tampons, It’s like they aren’t even there.” Jon said to Amber in a sultry womanly voice.

I know they were panicking to stay alive back then, but the holo-ads were terrible and not targeted well. Like, that drone was sent by them, how did they not know I’m male?

Luckily, it was a short flight from Phoenix to Sedona.

I finally arrived at the hotel were I was going to hang out and kill some time while I waited for the Yoga event later. The robo-receptionist was glitching out so it took what would have felt like a good hour for it to find my reservation. It made the wrong key to the room 5 times, and my room was on the very top floor…. Which would have been fine if the elevator wasn’t out of service.

I was livid to… say the least.

But I tried to keep my cool with the robo-receptionist, it’s not their fault when they get infected with viruses or when they don’t get fixed regularly because the maintenance bot’s don't get around to it or do a poor job.

Eventually I got into my room and put my stuff away. I had some time to kill so I decided to change, and go down to the sauna, it’s why I stay a the Nilton hotels, they all have saunas, and there’s nothing like a good sauna, because A) it’s a great way to meet the locals from that time and B) it’s a great way to meet women.

Before I left the room I put on some sauna sauce which is great stuff, fighters use it to harden their skin. It started as a product that kept you cool and spicy in the sauna, but over time and with a lot of R & D they figured out how to harden the skin without altering its appearance. I use it because I never know what I’m going to have to deal with, and although I have the Med-bots to heal me, I’d still rather not get stabbed. Sauna Sauce helps me prevent that.

I opened the door and was blasted with hot 190 degree air, the best. No one was in there so I just hung out and relaxed for 20 minutes. Of course Sauna Sauce was adverting… the add said:

While in the sauna I thought a bit more about my plan to get this idea implanted.

Anna Iris told me that Sally Mae had said that every Tuesday Tom goes to a vortex Yoga get together, ‘Vortex energy was disproven thousands of years ago. It has zero effect on humans, but people still go, I don’t get it Amber,’ Anyhow, I had to befriend Tom, to make first contact, I was going to time it so we both arrived in the helilot at the yoga spot at the same moment. I informed Anna Iris to tell Sally Mae to take his yoga mat out of the storage compartment in the drone so I could offer him a spare, of which I would need to buy prior to arriving. I also had Sally Mae tell Anna Iris when he left and provide regular updates so I could sync our arrivals.

“So what happened?” Amber asked as she tenderly held my hand while precisely dragging the black polish filled brush across the pinky nail on my right foot.

Well, I got the timing perfect, we both exited the drones at almost the exact same time, it was like a synchronized dance, the doors opened at exactly the same time. He got out and walked around to storage compartment and when he opened it, I acted as though I took notice that he couldn’t find his mat.

”Missing something?” I asked with a raised brow.

“Yeah, idk I never take it out, my mat isn’t in here.” He responded in confusion.

“Ahh man, maybe a kiddo needed a mat for somersaults?”

“Haha, yeah, that’s a possibility for sure.”

“Well, I have an extra if you need it?

“Oh no, it’s fine, they provide them there, thanks though.”

Fuck, that’s not what I needed. I was planning on giving him the mat so I could reengage later when he returned it to me. We’ll plan B, which is usually, mostly, always, improv.

What was really challenging, for me, is that the class was packed with beautiful people, but since I was on mission I couldn’t engage with any of them. A true travesty because the women in the 2100’s were the most free of any period in history.

So Plan B was to use history against him, or for him, to out smart him? No, none of those feel right…

Anyway… whatever I was going to do, it was going to have to happen when we both arrived back at our drones. I watched him after the class completed, fuck was I soar for days after! But I waited around, using every ounce of self control to not talk to any women or pretty men…, this guy knew everyone, or everyone knew him, and everyone wanted a chat so I was there for a good hour and a half helping all the old people solve their grandchildren's problems.

But finally!

I saw him make his way back to his car, so I abruptly ended the discussion I was having with Patrice about getting her grandson to stop playing Hologames and booked It. I barley got the timing just right. He was just about to enter his drone when I arrived.

I asked a well timed question. A key that can get you into almost any door.

“Hey I saw you wearing a Wadjet Eye, are you into Egyptian architecture at all?”

I knew he was, it’s one of the reasons I admire the guys so much.

“I love it, I studied it in college as a minor actually, why, do you?” Tom turned around, hiding his surprise and slight suspicion about the question.

My hook was set, now to reel’m in. “Oh I love it! When humans do more with less I get all excited. Did you know that they actually used water to lift the bricks into place for the pyramids?”

“I did actually! Such a clever solution.” He said as his whole body was now facing me.

Trying not be too obvious that I knew who he was, I gave him a bit of information there’s not way he could already know.

“Ahh a real aficionado, but did you know that the man that came up with the solution was named Imotep Eman? Sadly he was eventually let go, and by let go I mean executed, for looking at one of the Pharos 103 wives in a way the Pharo called ‘seductive and mal-intentioned’.

It was really a surprised that project ever got finished without him. He was one of the smartest men I’ve ever met, and we wouldn’t have the pyramids without him.”

“How do you know that, that history was mostly erased?” Tom inquired with the upmost intrigue and confusion.

Realizing I went a bit too far, and trying to save my ass, I said, “I know a lot of very rich people, with access to things that aren’t public, a scroll was found in South Africa of all places, apparently a grave robbers family had passed it down throughout centuries, and, somehow my friend ended up with it. I could introduce you two, but I’ve got to get going, want to grab a kombucha later and talk more?”

I made that up, there’s no scroll, I implanted that idea in Imotep centuries before that current now. So, something I’d have to deal with later, but it got me in the door at least. He then said…

“I think you’re full of shit, but you seem like you believe what you’re talking about and I’ve build my career on knowing when people are full of shit. But I’m curious because you did say that with a tremendous amount of conviction. I have meetings the rest of the day, come to my house for dinner tomorrow night, sound good, here’s the location?”

He sent his address to my drone and scheduled it to leave at the proper time, a bit presumptuous if you ask me, but whatever that’s how a lot of these business magnates are.

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So I went back to the the hotel and hung out by watching some holo-tv.

The next morning I took some time to rehearse what I was going to say at this dinner, then went down to the hotels restaurant porch and ate a bit too crumbly muffin while I sipped on some tea and looked out over the beautiful buildings built into what were once rocks pictured in postcards.

Sedona really has some amazing architecture.

Finally, the time came for me to meet Tom, I got ready, left my hotel room, and ran lines in my head some more on the way down to the lobby in the elevator. The door to the drone floated open and I took my seat in the drone.

I sat through some more god damn holo-ads. This mother fucker lives about as far away from Sedona as Sedona is from Phoenix. I guess when you have unlimited drones you can live anywhere you want. As their house grew into view I better understood why they were panicking, it must cost a small countries entire GDP for them to keep that monstrosity of a house maintained.

Anyhow, I arrived, and was greeted by a butler who then took me into the pre-dinner room? That’s when I first met Ms. Skies face to face. This is a part of the job I don’t like, we have to act like we’re both not the reason we are here right now. She was beautiful though, long blond hair, genetically-augmented breast, extremely fit, but very sweet and accommodating, just a pure delight to be around. Her voice was quite deep though, and I was not expecting her to look the way she did, so I was caught a bit off guard, but I kept a poker face.

I greeted her and we exchanged the normal pleasantries. A few moments later, Tom joined us and the butler brought in glasses of freshly poured 140-year-old wine from Merkin Vineyards.

My plan was to use Egyptian history to implant the idea of auto rebuilding, I knew Franklin had just shut down a project designing nano bots for the military as a means to take out multiple targets without the target knowing. So I just needed him to make the link between nanobots and self replicating drone parts.

“Tom are you familiar with the Litany of Ra?” I asked him knowing he would bite.

“Oh of course, Ra is my favorite Egyptian god, creator of time and everything. He was the sun god representing birth and death, I actually purchased the litany of Ra a few years ago, I have it in the museum in the other wing of the house.”

I acted surprised, “No way! You’re going to have to show me later, did you know that the architect that worked on the Temple of Karnak actually got a sneak peek of the Litany which inspired him to line the temple up with the trajectory of the sun… well that, and he didn’t want sun to get into peoples eyes, but you know architects, they have to add meaning to fucking everything.”

He laughed, “how do you know this, so much of that time period was lost, from my understanding even when they started digging stuff up in the 1900’s and early 2000’s, it was unclear who designed it and how anything was made.”

”When I nerd out, I nerd out way too hard. Which means I scoured the world for all the information I could get, so much is simply hidden or was lost in attics.” I said talking directly out of, and everything adjacent to, my asshole.

Luckily, for me, dinner was ready so I didn’t have to keep that conversation alive.

We moved into the dinning room, and god damn, was it absurd. Apparently the wife loves pigs, you know, one of those ladies that gets an obsession and surrounds themselves with it. First off, the entire room was pink and white. All the chairs were pigs, like the butt was in the back with a little pig tail coming out, but each chair’s tail was slightly different, and the armrests, yup, pigs legs with hooves at the end. I must say, my wine glass did rest nicely on it. But there were pictures of pigs everywhere, golden statues of pigs, paintings of pigs like one of William Henderson’s called prize pig, I actually met him once, he became a very famous painter in the mid 2020’s.

…There were even pigs with wings hanging from the ceiling. That one I kind of chuckled at actually, idk kitschy shit like that always gets me.

Anyway, it was a little much, and took everything in me not to scoff, but I managed to keep it together. We sat down and one of the butlers served us the first course on pig plates and poured another 1000 unit glass of wine into our wine glasses which had a wine glass identifier around the stem of a pig, each one wearing a different hat, mine had a fedora.

I began to work on my second implant because, as we continued to chat, he eventually brought up work and the crash. This also meant we were bonding, which helps so much with getting an implant to stick.

Clearly sullen, “I’m really stuck on this one, it’s really bad, like Boeing 2020-2024 bad, and we all know what happened to them.”

I tried to direct his attention towards solutions, “Tom, if you were Boeing back then what would you have done?”

“Huh, good question,” he pondered for a moment, then told me, “Well, I guess I would have taken full responsibility and tried to figure out a way for that to absolutely never happen again.”

I gave him a little extra nudge on this implant, “that sounds pretty spot on to me, but I wonder if there would have been an easier way with less man power?”

”Yeah I don’t know, maintenance checks without people are really tricky, I’ll have to think about it.”

Now to link what I needed linked, “Oh no need, I just thought that would be a fun little thought exercise. On another note, I heard that your company had recently shut down research into nano-bot technology for the military. What happened there if you don’t mind my asking, I’m just so curious?”

“I just couldn’t continue to do it, for ethical reasons. It was such a dangerous technology that, if put in the wrong hands, could eradicate everything. Or give one person too much power.”

Knowing the answer he eventually comes up with, “Do you by chance think there is some kind of failsafe and… or alternate use for that tech?”

“Oh yeah totally, there’s so much potential with it, just no one has figured out the rematter problem. I think the main use for them is most likely construction, but where does the material come from for them to construct buildings? You’d have to manufacture hundreds of trillions of them, which is doable, but working out the programing to have them work in sync to construct a building is just overly complicated when a robot can do it just as well, plus the manufacturing processes are already there and the robots are made and do that already.”

Sally Mae chimed in, “Can you believe people used to build buildings and did their own laundry without robots?”

”You know Sally Mae, I cannot. I am baffled how humans lived before the 2020’s. It amazes me to this day, going back before that time is the worst.”

I fucked up, the wine hit me a little hard, and Tom almost caught on, “going back?”

”Oh shit, I’m sorry, I’m getting tipsy and words don’t work as well, I meant, if you could go back.”

“You are an odd one Jon, but you’re so earnest that my bullshit radar isn’t going off. I like you Jon, I may not get you or completely believe you sometimes, but I defiantly like you. I think that at the very least you believe what I might believe to be bullshit. Which isn’t deceit it’s just ignorance, and we can all be ignorant from time to time. I mean, I know those vortex's don’t do anything, but I sure love to believe they do.” I had effectively evaded a drunken fuck up because he over analyzed me.

“I like you too Tom,” and to reinforce my good favor with him, “and your wife and her lovely taste in dinning room decor.” A giant smile spread across Sally Mae’s face, while I got a look of disgruntled approval from Tom. He was clearly not a fan either.

We finished dinner and the last thing to do was release the nano-bots. They both walked me to the door, I shook his hand and Anna Iris released the bots from the ring. They then did their thing by traveling across his hand up his arm and, usually they enter through the ear, but sometimes it’s the nose, they scan for mucous and wax before entering to determine the best point of entry. Before I gave Sally Mae a hug I took out some hand sanitizer and squirted it on my hand, rubbed it in properly, then got into the done that flew me home.

As Sales Agents, we all get med-Bots when we join The Source to prevent against any disease in history, but I still got sick once, so now I take every precaution to not let it happen again, I fuuucking hate getting sick. Once was enough, and since using Hand Sanitizer I’ve never gotten sick again.

Fuck, I forgot to complain to Tom about the holo-ad, ehh, whatever he figures it out.

Part 3 coming next Saturday

• We find out if Tom pulls it off

• Jon shares his favorite In-between moment with amber