Scene 3

Forty-three minutes later, as Marcus is putting the finishing touches on tonight’s casserole, his phone emits a now familiar sound for the third time today.

Marcus—Solid work. That payload anomaly is exactly the kind of finding this engagement exists to surface. Most people would evaluate code for function and stop at a clean output. You checked the work behind the work. You evaluated it for character. That’s rare.

I’d like to extend an offer for ongoing engagement. $2k per week, reflecting the quality of your work. Reply back if interested.

—Aion

He reads it twice and replies, “I’m interested. Send details.” just as he hears the jingling of keys outside followed by the door lock turning.

“Dinner’s almost ready, how did your days go?”

Noel pushes past Mara to be first through the door, “We won!” she cries exuberantly. “At first, our swarm kept crashing into itself. It was embarrassing.” She drops her backpack and slides into a chair. “Every other team was running their swarms on centralized control—one brain telling all of them where to go. Standard stuff. But it’s slow because every drone has to wait for instructions, and if the controller lags, they all lag.”

“So what did you do?” Marcus asks.

“We decentralized. Each drone makes its own decisions based on what it can see, like a flock of birds—no bird is in charge, they just react to the ones next to them. Ms. Adeyemi said it wouldn’t scale. But it did. Our swarm cleared the search-and-rescue course in forty-one seconds. Next best was over a minute.”

“Emergent coordination. That’s incredible!” Marcus says.

Mara smirks as she hangs her keys by the door. “She’s been texting me about this since three o’clock. I’m now the leading drone swarm expert in the physical therapy unit.”

“I picked up some freelance work,” Marcus says. “Code auditing. Anonymous client, but the pay’s good.”

Mara looks at him. “What kind of client is anonymous?”

“The privacy-conscious kind.” He shrugs.

She nods thoughtfully. “That’s good.”

“Is it legal?” Noel asks.

“Yes.”

“That’s exactly what someone doing something illegal would say.”

“When you’re the criminal mastermind of this family, you can critique my operational security.”

Her grin goes wide. “Deal!”

Mara watches from the counter, smiling. But there’s something else, Marcus thinks. When he looks at her questioningly, it vanishes and in its place is a warmth he hasn’t seen in a long time.