had enjoyed in a month. “Already?” he said to his soon-to-be wife, Sabrina, and the cook, who hovered worriedly at the dining room door. “I thought they said eight o’clock.”
“Well,” Sabrina said with fragile good cheer, “your friends always have been rather…exuberant.”
He smiled in spite of himself and put his linen napkin to the side. “Exuberant,” he repeated. “Spot on.”
The car horn honked a second time. “Why doesn’t he use the bloody intercom? My god, you’d think he was raised in a tube.” He stalked to the mullioned window and looked out over the spacious front lawn of the estate. A massive black car, Andrew’s Range Rover, was hunched just outside the wrought iron gate, lights glaring, and engine roaring.
The window swept down, and Andrew thrust his wildly tangled blonde head out. “Hoy!” he shouted, ignoring the electronic device almost at his cheek. “It’s me!”
“Idiot,” Ryan said, grinning. He lifted his head and called into the open air, “Fiona, would you please open the front gate for our guests?”
“Yes, Mr. Ryan,” replied the housekeeper AI. There was a distant grumbling as the iron wings spread wide; a moment later the Range Rover was racing toward the oval driveway. It lurched to a stop right in front of the entrance.
Like many of his closest friends, Ryan was very good—brilliant, in fact—with cybernetics. In his case, he was a near-genius when it came to a nasty little sub-branch of the discipline known as Remote Access Intervention, an almost entirely theoretical field that postulated methods of exerting control over artificial intelligences at a distance—robot mind control, to put it bluntly. Ryan also happened to be the scion of one of the country’s oldest and richest families, and with the recent death of his mother, he now found himself the beneficiary and prisoner to one of England’s larger fortunes.
What he loved most about his friends from university is how they really, truly, didn’t give a shit about his elevated class or his mountain of money. Sometimes, though, they could be a bit much.
Sabrina—neat, quiet, steely Sabrina—hovered in the doorway. “All of them?” she said quite seriously. “At once?”
He smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid so.”
The front door burst open, and Andrew flew in, a skittering mass of beer-fueled energy. Simon came in after him, far more calmly. He had his fists thrust into the pockets of his raincoat, and there was a weight, a grimness, about him that Ryan had never seen before. Samantha was close behind Simon, as beautiful and watchful as ever. Hayden, looking even sour, brought up the rear.
Sabrina looked from face to face and resisted the temptation to shake her head in dismay. Above all things, Sabrina was cordial. Well-bred. Polite to a fault. But she had no education in science, physics or otherwise, and even less interest in them. She recognized that her husband-to-be needed friends of his own, especially those who are accomplished in their own fields, but still…still.
She hadn’t wanted to host this little get-together. She had done her best to quash it before it began, but Ryan had been surprisingly and uncharacteristically insistent. “Simon wants to see me,” he said. “He wants to bring Hayden and Andrew and Sammy along. So that’s what we’re going to do.”
Sabrina resented it. She was not the type who enjoyed surprises. She liked—she required—that every detail of a social event be planned well in advance and executed flawlessly. Just throwing a few crackers onto a plate with some store-bought cheese slices and cracking open a keg was not acceptable. And yet, here they were, dripping dirty rainwater in her alcove and just waiting for her to leave.
The things we do for love, she thought bitterly.
Samantha was the first to speak. “Sabrina,” she said, stepping forward and smiling warmly, “I apologize for us barging in like this. I do hope we’re not causing too much of a problem.”
Sabrina smiled thinly. “Not at all,” she lied.
“Are there snacks?” Andrew asked, peering into the sitting room to one side.
Simon stepped forward and kissed Sabrina briefly on each cheek. “Thanks for the hospitality.”
“It’s nothing. May I ask why you didn’t use the intercom at the gate? If it’s broken…”
“No,” Hayden said. “It’s fine, I’m sure. We just…we didn’t use it, that’s all.”
The truth is, Simon said to himself, you don’t have a super-secret spy-phone that’s safe from eavesdropping, and we don’t want anyone to even know we’re here, so…god, this is getting complicated.
Sabrina slipped away to prepare the sitting room, and the rest of the group