I actually start driving us home before I remember Ezekiel has gone to the lab for the data breach. We do the same.
Ziro Labs is a white ultramodern complex built into the hillside at the edge of town. It’s basically the complete opposite of Ziro Hall and its gothic architecture, but with the same imposing sense of scale. I skip my usual spot near the front of the cylindrical main building and go around to the back. With the story I’m about to tell Ezekiel, I want as few witnesses as possible. I have an image to maintain here. These people are my colleagues, and while their first impression when I started working here was some trust fund baby riding his stepfather’s coat tails, I’ve worked hard to earn their respect. I can’t show up now with a wild story about time travel and blind dates.
“Wow. Alyssa said this place was big, but it’sbig,” Jasper says as I scan my thumb on the reader at the back door.
I frown at him. “When was Alyssa here?”
“She must have come with Clarissa. I didn’t?—”
“Prestidigitator,” I say when the screen prompts me for the password.
“Prestidigitator?” Jasper laughs. “What kind of place is this?”
“It’s just a lab, but the password is set up to require a random word with five or more syllables.” The lock clicks and I pull it open.
“Metamorphosis was already taken?” Jasper says as we head inside.
“I used that one last week.” Honestly, as we’ve finalized our research, I lobbied hard to increase security. Changing passwords once a week isn’t nearly enough, though the real security is inside, on our servers protecting the data and engineering models. “So, what did Alyssa say?” We typically don’t have visitors in the building, not even spouses.
“What?” Jasper’s walking around with his mouth open and his eyes wide, like he’s never been anywhere like this before. It occurred to me on the way over that bringing someone who works for Walter Wolfe into Ziro Labs was probably a bad idea, but desperate timesand all that.
“Alyssa said this place was big and what else?”
“Oh. She said you were...” He glances around like he’s trying to find an escape, but we’re waiting for the private elevator that takes us up to the executive level, so there isn’t anywhere to go.
“I was...?” I ask, mostly to watch him squirm. And maybe a little for my own ego, because I really need him to finish that sentence. Clarissa always framed my date with Jasper like she was doing me a huge favour. Like I couldn’t be trusted to meet someone on my own. So what if I’ve been locked up in the lab the last few years? When I was ready, I would have found someone. Look how well her plan to set me up with Jasper has gone. But I’m curious to hear what Alyssa said that convinced him to go out with me. “Morgan’s a nerdy shut-in with mommy issues and a boatload of emotional baggage” isn’t exactly a great sales pitch.
But Jasper’s still got his friendly, relaxed smile on as his gaze meets mine. Not a shred of pity. I’m already blushing before he says, “Alyssa also said you were funny and really good-looking, and well, I guess she was right.”
Jesus, how pathetic can I be? A guy I don’t know who works for a criminal organization called me pretty, and suddenly I’m out of words and my shoes have become very, very interesting.
“Sorry,” he says. “That was weird, wasn’t it?”
I should say yes. I should tell him this isn’t really a date anymore. It’s a survival mission. But my face is on fire, and what I actually want to do is tell him to keep talking. I might as well rub myself against his ankles like a cat.
Fortunately, before I have to confirm or deny, the elevator arrives. The distraction means the moment is gone by the time we start rising toward the top floor.
“What exactly do you do here?” Jasper asks.
“We’re saving the world.” My answer is immediate. A reflex. It’s the same answer I give at press conferences and cocktail parties. Everyone loves a good sound bite. For the first while, I wasn’t sure I believed it. The statement felt incomplete, knowing that we only had very human methods to accomplish the goals Ezekiel and I set out for ourselves. But over time, we made progress and came to understand how much we could do with the Ziro Machine. We’re going save the world. No superpowers required.
“Save it in general or in a specific way?” Jasper asks with a laugh.
“Didn’t we talk about this any of the first sixty times?”
He shrugs. “You said you had a presentation for work. Something about climate change. It feels more real, though, now that we’re here.”
I glance at him, but he doesn’t appear to be laughing at me specifically, so I humour him. “It’s basically impossible for industry and personal mitigation measures to achieve the carbon reduction targets world governments have set. We don’t need a better light bulb, we need a complete technological shift on how we illuminate the planet.”
“Sure.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets, which says to me this isn’t something he thinks about day and night the way I do.
“Ezekiel has designed a machine that captures excess energy from warming oceans.”
“But then what?” Jasper asks. “He beams it back to space?” The way he asks, he’s not being sarcastic. It’s a genuine request for more information. And yet, the question surprises me. Hardly anyone wants this much detail. Most people don’t ask anything at all. Despite decades of warnings, humanity continues to think of global warming as a future problem. They certainly don’t ask what happens to the energy we remove, which has always been the issue. Storing that much energy is like building a giant bomb. A world killer. And we did consider the space launch option for about half a minute, but the risks were huge, and we ran into the continued issue of traversing the greenhouse gas layer.
“We repurpose it. The Ziro Machine essentially functions as a power conversion and transmission plant. Like a heat pump for your house but with additions and on a scale to power whole cities. Industries can access it the way they would power from a fossil fuel–fired system, but it basically becomes a closed loop. We’re recycling power.”
It’s a work of art, honestly. It took forever to come up with something that would actually do what we needed it to. The technology to efficiently convert trapped heat in the seas into useable electricity doesn’t exist. Or it didn’t, until Ezekiel finally had his idea for the converter. I’d started to give up hope that our vision would only ever be theoretical. But one night, he burst into my office, face flushed and eyes bright with excitement. It was such a stark contrast after his daily persona of exhausted grief that I knew he’d finally broken through. He showed me a sketch of what would become the Ziro Machine, and the rest is history. One that will be responsible for shaping the future.
