London Harmony: Minuette (13 page)

She chuckled and blushed and said, “May I have my hand back?  I find it useful for holding things and opening jars and such.”

I blushed as I dropped it and rushed out, “Yes, of course, terribly sorry.  I've seen your art, it is amazing.”

She got a little bashful and lowered her head as a mild blush bloomed on her cheeks.  Bran was looking at her with nothing but pride and love.  Then she said as she waved her hand absently at the tiny but cute terror on Tim's back.  “That little monster is our daughter, Joy.”

The little girl looked over and gave me a cheesy grin.  She was pretty funny and outgoing already and she was just a little girl.  Fran said, “And quite a mechanic.  She knows the difference between a standard and Philips screwdriver.”  The little one held up her screwdriver cutely.

Robin chuckled. “That would be Tim's influence.”

Bran sighed and said, “I must be off Tim.  I promised the girls the London Eye today.  You're on your own.”

He just walked over to them with the cute growth on his back.  Bran disengaged her daughter, set her down where the little one immediately grabbed her other mum's hand and handed the screwdriver back to Tim, who just went back to his work.  He was a different sort of bloke, but I found myself liking his distracted behavior.  He was paying more attention to what was going on around him than he was letting on.

The little one was straining, trying to pull her mum. “Let's go, mommy, I wanna ride the big wheel.”

Robin was smiling into the air and said, “It really was nice meeting you Nett, but I'm afraid we need to do the tourist thing or little Joy is going to explode.  Maybe we'll have time to chat later.”  Then she added, “Bye Frannie.”  Fran reached out and gave her arm a little squeeze.

Bran gave us a grin and a helpless look then the three of them started off on their adventure.  I noted that Joy said cutely, “Stairs down.” She placed her mother's hand on the railing.  I was grinning until they disappeared down the stairs.

I had to smile at Fran as I said, “She was adorable.”

Tim spoke from where his face was buried inside the machine, “She was raised by two puppies who taught her how to wrap her moms around her pinky finger.”

Fran raised a hand and said soberly, “True statement of fact.”

They were pulling my leg.  Right?

Then Tim put his hand back and absently said, “Phillips screwdriver.” 

Fran snorted and nudged her chin toward the man.  “You be the mad scientist's Igor while I sort through the new stuff.”

I nodded dumbly and walked over to the mess of tools and electronics.  I picked up a screwdriver and stared at it.  “Umm...”

He didn't miss a beat and said, “Cross tip.”

I chuckled and handed him the other screwdriver.  I sort of spaced out in helper mode as I obsessed about the words Mindy put in that third layer of music.  Those were our words.  Was she talking about our friendship?  Was it more than that?

Fran was lost with her headphones on, swaying to Mindy's music as her fingers flew over the keyboard.

After a bit, Tim seemed to be done ripping the guts out of the unit and replacing a good chunk of the innards with new modules.  He seemed to surface for air and turned to look at me.  Then paused and looked down, then arched an eyebrow.  “You, I like.”

I blushed and followed his gaze down to his now super organized toolbox and tool belt.  All of the circuit boards, screws, and miscellaneous bits and pieces were all now grouped by size and laid out in straight rows.  I couldn't handle the disorganized mess.  Evil Fran looked back at us with a grin.

Curiosity was killing me, I had done some research on him since I started working here with Fran, adding data to the unit.  “What got you into prosthetics and robotics?  I mean, you are like a legend in the field.  Everyone says that you are never satisfied with your advancements in the field.”

Fran seemed to pause in her swaying to the music.

Tim wiped his hands on a rag he had tucked into his waistband as he tilted his head, regarding me with those intelligent eyes.  He seemed to be debating on whether to share the answer with me.

Then he just grabbed one of the access panels and a screwdriver and started buttoning the unit up.  “A while back, before they were Satin Thunder, and I was just an undergrad engineering student, some friends of mine, Kimi Soloman and Skylar Roth, gave me Sky's buggered up, piece of crap prosthetic foot.  Kimi asked me to fix it.”

He shrugged as he deftly snapped a cowling on the side of the machine. “I'm still working on it.  I'm five generations in on it, and I'm sure that the next generation or so should be the best I can give Sky.”

I blinked.

Tim was behind Skylar Roth's prosthetic foot?  It was iconic in the music world.  Sort of one of the signatures of Satin Thunder.  Besides their awesome music, Sky's foot and those amazing tattoos on her burn-scarred skin were the first things you thought of when someone said Satin Thunder.

I looked at the man as he finished up.  He had been working for what?  Like two decades now?  Just to get a friend's artificial foot just right?  And built a company around it?  Huh, I really, really liked this bloke.

I smiled at him when he looked back at me and I cocked an eyebrow and asked, “And SmartCanvas?”

Fran snorted and took off her headphones.  I guess I was not the first to ask.  Tim had a wicked gleam in his eye as he gave me a lopsided, sardonic smile that almost made me chuckle.  He said plainly, “Because all the other engineers told Bran that it was impossible, and a guy needs a hobby.”

Small Fry chirped out, “Tim and June are cut from the same cloth, they both preach at the altar of, 'It's only impossible until somebody does it.'.”

Just about then Tasha poked her head into the attic.  “Knock knock wenches.  Lunch?”  She paused when she saw Tim and she looked him up and down, studying him then asked, “Tim?”

He grinned.  “The one and only, Natasha.”

The two women seemed to roll their eyes simultaneously and said in chorus, “Thank God.”  I was just grinning at their antics.  Then Tash asked him, “Join the wenches?”

He seemed to think about it a second and said distractedly, “I'm not sure when I ate last.  So sure.”  Then added a heartbeat later, “Will there be beer?”

I thought Fran's smile was going to split her face as she looped an arm in Tim's and pulled him toward the stairs.  “Come along Tinker, we'll get you situated.”  It must have been some sort of inside joke.  I scurried to catch up, metering my steps as I counted my steps.

It was fascinating to listen to the two speak over lunch at a little cafe down the lane.  I kept getting distracted by the words of the other melody Mindy had embedded into her music.  I could almost pretend they meant what I wished they did.

I snapped out of it when Fran asked after Brandye and June's mothers.  That was one of those surreal moments about working with the people from London Harmony, they spoke of rock legends like Penny Franklin and Mandy Fay Harris like they were just normal people.  I just set my elbows on the table and rested my chin on my hands as I listened to them catch up.

Then before long, we were heading back to work.

When we got there, Tim explained to both of us, the upgrades he made to the unit and that he would be testing the new multiplex channel, high-speed data transfer systems remotely when he arrived back in the States.  Somehow the unit would utilize cell towers to perform huge data transfers and streaming that were orders of magnitude faster than conventional channels.

I admit I was curious so I asked questions.  I'm no techie, so he dumbed it down for me without making me feel like a complete git.  He thought for a moment then said, “Imagine your cell phone, how it makes a connection to the tower.”

I nodded.

“You are able to transfer data at a predetermined rate.  Whether it is voice or internet data doesn't matter, data is data and is all sent in little packets back and forth between the tower and your unit.”

He locked eyes with me to make sure I was still following, then added, “Now imagine that instead of your hardware having the capability of making one connection, that it could open ten connections in tandem and use all that bandwidth for one massive data pipe.”

Wow, I understood that.

He grinned. “That is essentially what we are doing. We basically have the equivalent hardware of ten cell phones that make multiple connections to the cell tower network, to allow us to transfer enough live data that we can wirelessly stream live content from our cloud servers without having to have a hardline broadband DSL wired into the units.”

I blinked, he made it sound so simple, and to him it probably was.

“If this tests successfully, we will start producing upgrade modules for all the installed SmartCanvas 3 units.  There will be room in the module for future LNB installation for areas without good cell coverage so we can utilize satellite bandwidth.”

I glanced over at Fran, who was watching me with a grin on her face.  I grinned back and brought a finger up to my lips to flop them around making a, “bleblplbleblplbleblpl,” sound as I crossed my eyes.

She chuckled and said, “That's how I responded when he first described it to me.”

He furrowed his brow. “It's just a commons sense approach to solving a bandwidth problem.”

Fran said, “You just keep thinking that Tinker, we'll just nod stupidly in agreement.”

I nodded to demonstrate, and we chuckled at the perplexed man.

Fran said to me like he wasn't there, “He sometimes forgets that not everyone is an engineering genius like him.”

He blinked at us a couple times then turned away and pulled out a tablet that he connected to the unit and started running what looked like diagnostics, humming the Phantom Track under his breath.

I turned back to my computer and started organizing the mess Fran had made of her SmartCanvas intros.  I swear she is getting lazier and lazier about labeling and placing them in the appropriate directories and adding them to the database.  That might be my fault since I was obsessive about keeping her organized since I felt so guilty about them paying me for the whole Minuette sham.

She hummed over at her computer next to me.  I glanced at her screen.  A new email from Bear.  She said, “With your input, Bear was able to strip out the next nested level in Minuette's masterpiece.”

I grinned, it was a masterpiece, I had nothing but pride for my best mate.  She continues to surprise me every day as I learn how deep her genius really runs.  She clicked on the attachment and the normal cascade of notes from the piano that had an almost organic, living feel to them, my voice rang out with a simple piano accompaniment now.

Those five lines sounded almost sad, wanting.  I felt tears threatening as I listened to it.  My hand absently tapping my leg to the thumping that accompanied the track.

While the emotions of it washed through me, Tim turned to us and said, “That woman should be a coder.”

Fran tilted her head in question and he said, “It is amazing the multiple layers and formats she uses to form one complete piece.”

Formats?

He prompted, “What does the underlying code say?”

Now he had both Fran and my laser focused attention.  She repeated, “Underlying code?”

He said as he typed on his pad absently, “Yeah, the Morse Code message.”  He paused and squinted at us as we both looked at each other in confusion.

He looked surprised and stopped working and said, “Oh, you didn't know?  The thumping in the music.  It is Morse Code.  Mine is rusty, I haven't played around with Morse since I was a little kid, but I recognize a few letters but not all of them.  There are thirty letters in the message.”

Bloody hell!  Another message?  Another layer?  Did it just keep going?  I caught my hand absently tapping out the message.

Fran shook her head incredulously. “Tim, you never cease to amaze me,” she mumbled. “I'll get this to Bear and see if he can't decode it for us.”

As she excitedly went to it, I pulled out a tablet and pulled up a Morse Code chart.  I tried not to be obvious as I tapped out the code on my leg as I assigned letters to it.  I stopped breathing at the first two letters.  Shite!  They were Mindy's initials. M S.

My heart started racing.  I shut off the pad in a mini panic.  She put her initials in whatever the message was.  That would be a dead giveaway to Fran.  That was it.  They would know now.  I'd be sacked and...

I stood up quickly in guilt and shame and wiped a tear from my face.  I had to get out of there.  I couldn't face their disappointment in me.  It hurt even more because I considered them friends, and in an odd way, extended family.

I started for the stairs quickly.

Fran called out, “Nett?  Are you ok?”

I didn't even count as I ran down the stairs calling back, “I... I can't... I have to go.”

I ran down all the way down to the lobby and past Jen.

She called after me, “Nett?  You're crying.  Nett?”

I got outside and ran to the bus stop just as a coach arrived.  I didn't breathe until I slumped into a seat in the back.  With a shaky hand, I pulled out my buzzing cell and declined the call from Fran.  Then I dialed Mindy.  When she answered, all I could say in a shaky voice was, “I need you at home.”  She just made an affirming sound and I rang off.