Cross My Mind

GOING BACK HOME

For the rest of the day, Garba and Mila stayed together discussing each others lives and enjoying each other's company. On the other hand, Dr. Nora has been busy setting up their exit plan.

At around Four PM in the evening, Mila and Garba were rounded at Nora’s makeshift office, where they are to be given their final briefing before setting out for their individual journeys home. In the office, the two say on chairs sitting face to face with a man neither of them remember meeting before.

Nora sat on the opposite side of the table facing them. He is sure that they don’t remember him or any of the experiments he and Akihiro have put them through because Akihiro’s techniques for inducing memory loss are very effective. With a forced Smile on his face, he cleared his throat and said.

“Congratulations Garba Danladi and Mila Goldenberg for reaching the final stage of our device trials. I know that you don’t particularly remember much of it but your medical scans have shown us you are very okay to go. The short term memory loss is the side effects of the explanation surgery, but all in all you two have yielded the best results so far and as promised, we have prepared a your compensation payment ready and have taken cared of all your transportation needs back home. I am Dr. Nora by the way, I head this particular research for Neuratechnologies together with Dr. Akihiro”

Garba is a little suspicious, something tells him there is more than that to what happened to them but can’t tell for sure, so he kept it to himself.

“your flights have been scheduled for tonight and based on the account details you provided, we have taken the liberty of crediting both of you the sum of a million dollars each. Once you finish the clearance process and pay your taxes back in your individual homes, you would be able to access the money. We appreciate your courage and contribution to Neuratechnologies for the testing of our new device. Once you sign here, you are free to proceed to our bus station to be taken to the airport” Dr. Nora added and handed over two forms to them. The two signed the forms and walked out of the room smiling.

“So where are you going to from here?” Garba asked Mila out of the blue. She turned and looked at his face with a smile on her face.

“Home, I’ll check on my pops and his wife, visit my mother and use the rest of the money I get to move on with my life. What about you? Where will you go and what will you do next?”. She asked back.

Garba was now smiling, he walked to the nearby seat and sat.

“I will go home for now, check up on my dad and use to money to take care of my sister, she is the most important thing for me in the world” He said.

“Pock her up and come to the United states, in Louisiana we can set up a small IT firm, we can help your sister get her education from CALTECH or any other School she wants.” Mila said with overwhelming familiarity towards Garba that surprises both Garba and herself.

“Am I the only one feeling that? …….. It is like We have known each other for forever”. Mila added.

“There is this openness and intimacy that I feel between us, it is super weird for me too because it doesn’t make sense. It feels like we know each other much more than we actually do. It is really weird and I cant figure it out either. I have no memory of the experiment as well so may it is during the period that we got close.” Garba responded.

“I will think about your offer too, but I have to settle down at home first and think this through”. He added.

The two got back to their glass cubes and prepared for their exit from the Mega Building and journey back home. At around Six PM in the evening, they were taken to the nearest airport where each of the started their journeys back home.

****(Shadrach's apartment, somewhere in California)****

Dr. Reece Mallory has been staying in Shadrach’s house for the last twenty three hours, she has gotten comfortable and have settled it properly. It also made her at ease more when Shadrach assured her that his security guards are hand picked private guards from a private security firm run by a friend of his. Interestingly,

MEDULLA has already finished decrypting all the files but cannot make any sense of the data in them, unlike when Ababio managed to open the first one, MEDULLA opened the files to find randomized bits data scattered around the folders.

Reece has asked MEDULLA to reconstruct and arrange the data back into usable form but the estimated time it would take MEDULLA to finish doing so is five days, so she used the opportunity to take a look at Shadrach’s new work.

“have you any specific hardware design for the processing unit of the humanoid robot ?” she asked Shadrach all of a sudden.

“What do you mean, my job is to build the body of the robot not its CPU. I already told you that NASA intends to have someone else design and build the appropriate CPU for it. Most of the working concepts for the robot are in fact still theoretical”. He said.

“What if I help you build the processing unit? That can work very efficiently with the body?” Demanded Reece.

“That would be awesome but we don’t have the necessary resources and materials for something so advanced. It would be awesome though if we can pull it off. Unfortunately ………”

“Have you forgotten who I am Shadrach? We also have all that I will need for something as easy as hardware building. You may have to request a few parts from your NASA employers but we mostly have all we need.” Reece interjected.

Shadrach was laughing at her sudden conviction but immediately remember who he is talking to. Reece has made a notorious name for herself throughout the scientific community for making an impossibly difficult task look easy, worse of all is that she would go to so much extra mile just to flaunt it at the faces of those who tried to convince her that she cannot do it.

“You’re not joking about this are you?” Shadrach asked but he knows very well that even without an answer she isn’t Joking.

Reece has already gone back to the computer where MEDULLA is busy extrapolating the scattered data.

“Can you spare another of your clone programs for MEDULLA, I need assistance with something else apart from the data”.

“Anything for you mother.” MEDULLA said.

****(Catalina Villas, California)****

Agent stone decided he needs to do more study of his target in order to properly be able to track her down. “A hunter needs to know his prey as much as he knows himself” he reminded himself as he walks back into Reece’s apartment. Inside, Reece is a carrier driven woman and has not taken any interest in the mundane. Her living room has no decorations on the wall, a cleaning robot going to and from different corners cleaning the apartment.

Agent Stone walked straight into her bedroom and started going through her stuff, after getting through hundreds of journals she has published, about fifteen more published by her colleagues and over thirty certificates of awards she has been honored with from different research institutions, manufacturers and Colleges all over the world for her brilliant innovations and inventions.

Agent Stone has to also go through an entire locker full of awards and trophies she has won for various innovation competitions she has competed in right from high school to her current position.

After about twenty minutes of close investigation of her documents, he finally found a photo album.

'someone with her type of lifestyle must not have a lot of friends, hopefully I will get an idea where she might have gone to hide away at the time being' he thought to himself and went ahead to open the photo album.

To his expectations, he has been flipping through Reece’s oversized photo album for over ten minutes, but has not seen a single acquaintance she has. Most of the pictures are singles, where she stands alone with an award.

But that is not all, apart from the usual background persons that appear in some of the pictures, there is a specific individual who has been appearing recurrently in the last few pictures. He quickly flipped through the remaining pictures and the individual is in all her recent pictures. A man with a shaved head, a properly built body. In some of the pictures, The man and Reece were at NASA, in some sort of Training facility.

Agent Stone tore off the picture and checked the back, he found written in tiny handwriting

‘Reece Mallory and Shadrach Anthony forever'

He quickly pulled out his phone from his jacket and Opened an application with no name and no icon, once the application was open, it required three sets of passwords which the Agent provided from memory and the application opened. It displayed a space for name and picture input.

He typed Shadrach Anthony and snapped the Man’s picture from the photograph, then pressed send on his phone.

The phone showed a status bar that says 'time to completion of search: Twenty seven minutes'.

Agent Stone went to Reece’s refrigerator and pulled out an ice cream container, sitting on her couch back in the living room and started to take the ice cream while waiting for the search to be completed. Once completed, Agent Stone figured out that the man is in fact the only nearby close person His target could turn to in her situation, his house is located a hundred and fifty-eight miles away in the coast of San Diego. The only problem is that this man is a NASA astronaut and researcher whose house is heavily guarded all the research he makes are sensitive and confidential.

“One way or another, I will get through to my target” he muttered while looking at the police badge he stole from the dead police officer on his way to Pasadena.

****( Youngsville Louisiana)****

A few hours earlier during the day, Mila has arrived back home in Youngsville. Mila’s initial intention when she departed from the Neuratechnologies research center in Texas, she has intended to go straight to her boyfriend Jeremy, but she has no idea where he is at the moment and his phone is not going through.

Although Mila genuinely hates the sight of Mr. Goldenberg and his wife Lola, she remembers that the mansion they are currently staying in currently belongs to her, when her mother committed suicide the family lawyer has made the will of Mrs. Goldenberg known and although Mila was still a child when it all happened, she knows very well that the mansion and a majority of the properties in her father’s control right now have been passed down to her through her mother’s will.

Mr. Goldenberg however has used his influence and power as the former mayor of Youngsville to h****k the will and had it forged and reframed, giving him the rights to all of the properties that are supposed to go to Mila.

Since her mother died, she has been using the bedroom on the second floor which used to be her mother’s, and one of the reasons why she has left home to live with Jeremy, a charming Musician she met at a rock concert is because the house reminds her of all that is wrong with her life, all that she has suffered and the day her mother took her own life.

At first, her father was not home with his wife Lola, Mila has had the freedom and peace of their absence to properly make peace with her Mother’s suicide, having reached adulthood, she can now understand the mental strength that it takes to live with her father.

A faint giggle and laughing voice of a woman can be heard from the floor below, knowing the house was empty, Mila woke from her daydream and walked to the balcony to see who it was but was met with a scene that made her heart itch.

Lola has walked into the living room and was all over Mr. Goldenberg on the couch.

Lola raised her head and saw Mila standing and starring at them from the balcony of the second floor.

“Look who decided to come home darling” the woman said while pointing upwards.

Mr. Goldenberg raised his head and to look at Mila and as their eyes met, She could see the obvious signs of old age and tiredness in his face.

“So you decided to come back, have you forgotten the words you shouted to when you left this house five months ago?” Lola said.

Mila waited to see if her father would say anything, but he didn’t. He just sat on the couch with Lola’s head on his lap spouting nonessential insults at her.

Mila walked back to her mother’s room and picked her phone which she initially plugged to charge. She dialed Jeremy’s number once more and this time, it got through. In a few minutes of conversation she found out that he just arrived back in Louisiana the night before following his Nationwide musical journey.

She packed her clothes in a traveling bag and walked down the stairs where she met her father still seated on the couch of the living room watching a baseball game. He looked at her and continues to watch his game without a word.

“I forgot why I left in the first place, it is not because Lola came here, but because my father is long dead and this one is just an empty shell Mila said out and dragged her bag out to the compound,, towards the exit.