Phyton: Episode 4

**Previous Episode or First Episode**

Jeff sat down next to him and pulled out a stack of papers, of course they were all blank to Al, but he saw the glasses peeking out of Jeffs shirt pocket. “Aren’t you worried that even knowing that there is alot more information on this case might bias my ‘expert analysis’?”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Jeff’s realization and maybe a bit of consternation showed. “But surely knowing that you could be biased would cancel that out, right?”

“I’m not a psychologist, but I already suspected that the agency wasn’t sharing all it knew,” Al shrugged, “Seems to be standard practice.”

“This is the first time I’ve been on a case like this. Have you seen it before?”

“Yes, back during the GMO ban, they used the same tech for documents back when I was part of a team investigating the relevance of the ban. They must have squirreled away a warehouse full of that paper so they could go back to after the secure entity tablets were removed from service.”

“Someone had the foresight.”

“Or the bureaucracy.” They both chuckled, someone near Al’s age was probably being rewarded for keeping the paper around when it had really just been a case of procrastination.

Jeff put on the glasses and started reading. Al watched the countryside flash by below, just a few more years and the cross country hyperloop would open, no more need for long distance flights across the continent. But by definition the hyperloop was a vacuum tube system, so there probably wouldn’t be any views during the journey.

“What do you know about the Fislers?” Several minutes had passed along with the Rockies. Al couldn’t quite read Jeff’s face, what did he know that he was asking this now?

“What the public knows?”

“No, how you know them.” Of course, but then the public probably didn’t know much about them.

“They’re both nice people. I knew both of them before they met. Bright, probably some of the brightest assistants I ever had. They had opposite scheduled days and near the end of the term there was a scheduling situation which brought them in together. They hit it off and it seems to be working for them. They were married a few months after that, quite remarkable the amount of talent between them.”

“They weren’t actually in your field though, right?”

Al nodded, “Gustaf, Gus, was studying to be a medical doctor, but could easily switch realms from human physio to plants in a blink of an eye. I would catch him doing homework in the lab. After the first few times I gave up asking him if he was finished since he was already done. I just gave him more to do.” He paused getting lost in remembering how smoothly and quickly experiments were put together and completed. “And Angela, she was a marine biologist interested in plankton, she also had such a dexterity with machines and programming. Entities that had slowly become useless to me were quite responsive to her. I was there when they met. To me it seemed they covered all the subjects in the world, coming to a consensus and yet somehow getting all the lab work done.”

“Did you attend their wedding?”

“Yes, it was quite the to-do. Lots of appreciative family, both were thought to be too driven to ever reach that point, and the families were happy to be proven wrong.”

“Did you stay in contact with them afterward?”

“Can’t say that I did, saw some posts on the usual sites, about them having a kid, what was that, three years ago?”

“About four and a half, actually.”

“Well time flies. From what I’ve been told, it seems they are doing very well for themselves. And with…”

“Edward, a pretty uncommon name these days.”

“Edward, no kidding, but he’s probably just about ready to go into kindergarten this fall, right?”

“It looks like it.” Jeff tensed.

Al sighed, “What else do we know about them?” He hoped to get a bit more out of Jeff, but it looked like he needed to catch up a bit on the “usual websites” before the Fislers picked him up at the airport.

“A bit.” Jeff glanced at the older man, and back down to the pages.

“Well I guess we'll just have to see, won’t I?”

“Yep.”

The rest of the flight continued in silence.

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