I was a prisoner in my own office building. Thor had left me alone with the guard, claiming the man was going to be my butler for the day. To bring me food or coffee. But he wasn't there to help. I just couldn't figure out if he was there to prevent me from leaving, to spy on me, or both. Either way, I was glad to be left more or less alone with a computer for a while. Thor had explained more about the problem they were having with Gaia. I pretended I didn't know what Gaia was and just nodded my head a bunch. When I asked what Gaia was used for, he told me it was confidential. When I asked who the client was, he said that was confidential, too.

The other guard came back with a change of clothes and some coffee. Apparently the best he could find were some black cargo pants and an old cream-colored dress shirt. He'd probably gotten them from the janitor's closet. They were too big, but at least didn't smell like vomit. I asked for them to leave the room so I could change, but they just turned around. I changed as quickly as I could. The clothes smelled faintly of cigarettes, which made me want to gag.

I desperately wanted to take a shower, but I figured that would have to wait. I was dead tired. The day had worn me down. It wasn't even five o'clock yet, but I felt as though I'd lived a week's worth of experiences since just this morning. I wondered what Alex was up to and if he'd managed to unlock my phone yet. That was my first order of business.

I walked up to the guards.

"Can I borrow a phone, please?"

One of them pointed at the desk phone sitting next to the computer.

"I need to send a text message and my phone's out of battery."

The guards looked at each other. One of them shrugged. The other rolled his eyes and handed me his phone. No passcode. What a joke.

I typed out a message and sent it to my cell. Even when locked, my phone would display the first part of any text message, so I figured that should help Alex get in if he hadn't already. I waited a moment and then deleted the message before handing the phone back to the guy.

"Thanks," I said.

He winked.

Then I sat down at the computer. It felt good to be back in a comfortable place again. Sitting in a dim room, behind a twenty-seven-inch ultra-high-definition screen connected to a maxed-out Mac Pro. It had been too long. Good old Macintosh, always there whenever people let me down. I still preferred the old days when my Mac would smile at me when it turned on. On my personal computers, I'd changed the startup logo to an old-school one just for fun.

Someone had already preloaded Gaia's source code on to this machine for me. I was already familiar with the code structure from having played around with it in New York, so instead of tinkering, I decided to just try to get the thing running. Based on what Alex and I conjectured about Gaia's capabilities, I wasn't about to try to turn this death machine on. But I needed to better understand what we were up against. Until I could sneak out of here to find Taye, toying around with Gaia was the only thing I could do to make any progress. Maybe Taye had left clues inside Gaia that I could use to find him. If they were holding him in a similar room, we might be able to communicate by modifying the source code.

So, I tried to run Gaia with my hand over the kill switch. Like Thor had said, it didn't work. No need for the kill switch yet. I peeked at the source code again. Something was off. This was not the same source code I had seen in New York. Someone had changed it significantly. It was even less like my original template than it was last time.

I pulled up the source code history. As expected, it listed a lot of recent changes, and these changes were weird. Ultra-frequent. Like they weren't even human. Then it became clear to me. Even though Gaia seemed broken and unable to run, there had to be a working copy of Gaia still running somewhere, and it was modifying its own source code. Doing what? I had no idea yet. It could take me days or weeks before I could even glean a basic understanding of what was going on.

There was nothing I could do with this code. I couldn't debug it even if I wanted to. And I certainly didn't want to. But maybe I could figure out what the working copy of Gaia was up to.