Read Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4) for Free Online

she’d cottoned on to how good at math I was and had insisted on keeping in touch, which had evolved into the form of irregular card games during which she picked my brain about the latest research.
    Of course, she wanted me to do a lot more with her. Explore new research. Write papers. Collaborate. She didn’t know my higher mathematical intuition had been burned out of my brain—that somehow, at some point, it had been taken from me. The emptiness festered, a blistering hole I’d never be able to bridge.
    Sometimes the conversations with Halliday made the ache exponentially worse. Sometimes they felt like the only thing left to me.
    I didn’t tell her either of those things.
    Ostensibly, I’d agreed to keep seeing her on the condition that she put equal time into repairing her fractured relationship with Arthur. After the help we had given her the year before, she probably would have been doing that anyway, but pretending I had someone to blame for saying yes to her was a pleasant fiction.
    “You don’t give up, do you?” I grumped.
    “Not when it comes to mathematics, no. Is your job with Arthur over?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I’m on another one, though.”
    “I see. You wouldn’t be putting me off, would you?”
    “I’m sure you’ll know it when I do. I’m a terrible liar.” My email pinged with a message from Pilar. “Once this job is over. Okay?”
    “Nothing would make me happier. I’ll call you in a few days’ time.”
    I grunted. “If it weren’t for Arthur, I would blow you off, you know.”
    “I have no doubt,” she answered with perfect dryness.
    “Are you laughing at me?”
    “You have informed me on several occasions that I have no sense of humor.”
    “You ought to remember that more often. You do know I’m going to kick your ass.” I could card-count like a shark.
    “You always do.” It never seemed to bother her. “I shall talk to you soon.”
    I stabbed at the phone to hang it up and turned my attention to my email. Pilar had sent me access to a server folder instead of links or email attachments, and once I logged on I could see why.
    Holy shit. Halliday might have to wait more than a few days to lose a week’s pay to me.
    ♦ ♦ ♦
    When Arthur knocked on my door that night, I had printed out and fitted together zoomed-in satellite images all across my floor, until one huge map of the greater Los Angeles area carpeted the space. My sparse furniture was pushed to one side, and I perched on the table, gazing down.
    Pilar had not only gotten me the qualitative reports, she’d found gigs and gigs of testing data, actual numbers I could manipulate and adjust and use to answer the question of whether I’d be able to adapt the technology in reality. She’d also traced the location of where the prototypes had ended up after Arkacite had disintegrated—breaking in and lifting one would be the easy part, as long as the mathematics told me a smooth overlap of the devices’ influence would be possible in the first place.
    Thousands of inputs. A two-dimensional surface function that undulated above the differentiable manifold of Los Angeles, mapping and combining, the colors striating and then smoothing as I tweaked each point source. A delicate spider web over the city, each thread tugging at every other in a massive, continuous constraint satisfaction problem.
    “Russell? You there?” Arthur called.
    I reached down from the table and unlocked the deadbolt. “Come in.”
    He opened the door to step inside and stopped short, taking in my floor full of paper. “Hey. Whatcha doing?”
    “Differential geometry.”
    “Sorry I asked.” He sidestepped against the wall to avoid walking on any of the sheets. “We got another one.”
    My head snapped up. “Another what?” Dread pooled in my gut. I was pretty sure I knew.
    Arthur had his hands shoved in his pockets, his shoulders sloping with fatigue. “Think it’s Pourdry again.”
    “What the fuck. Tell me it isn’t kids