AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And if he thought now that she was charming or sweet, then that was just part of her facade. She was a con artist, and it was a blessing that he had discovered it before doing something stupid, like asking her to break protocol and see him after their time at the center was over.
He strode back toward the tables. He needed to eat something. That would lift his mood. They had skipped dinner last night.
His mind delivered him an unhelpful image of what they had done instead of eating and he suddenly felt gutted.
Why do I feel heartbroken and disappointed? I’m getting my baby, and if nothing else, its genetic mother is smart. It’s good not to fall in love.
His stomach turning, he strode past the tables and the food, pacing the back of the room and trying to get his head on straight.
15
OBERON
Oberon waited as Olivia and Dr. Oppyx traversed the hallways and staircases to reach his servers.
Just outside the Center walls, angry protesters carried signs and torches and screamed into the night. They were so angry, and most of it seemed to be focused directly on him.
Only a portion of Oberon’s memory was available to serve his subjects and staff, as the rest was occupied in a desperate attempt to make sense of what the drones were seeing and report it to the soldiers outside in a manner they would find acceptable.
The fraction left for his own analyses was so insignificant he could think only in one dimension.
And perhaps that was just as well.
Oberon was experiencing what a biological being might calldespair.
He was unable to keep the Center safe. He hadhelped his subjects to conceive, but wasn’t at all sure they would continue the bond to preserve the pregnancy.
And he bitterly regretted that his own secret agenda as a matchmaker was lost, too.
Things had been going so well with Olivia and Stark. Against all odds, and in spite of their differences in belief and background and the gap in their ages, the two seemed to be falling in love.
Now it seemed that all was lost over a simple matter of credits.
Why was moneysoimportant to these creatures?
And besides, Stark had so much of it - more than he could spend in a hundred lifetimes at the rate he spent it now. Why would he care if Olivia was paid for her work?
Obeying his directive to smooth matters between subjects, Oberon had slipped through the system at Olivia’s bank to find the transaction in question. The minimal payment from the homeowner seemed like a more than fair price for a job well done - particularly if she had followed up by alerting Stark’s company without asking for a reward.
She was a Terran, yet she had found something that made her passionate and she used it to help others. Why did Stark not recognize her for her bravery and her selflessness?
Oberon was excited for her to take a look at his own workings, though he suspected that now that she had the news of her pregnancy and things were bad with Stark the servers might not have her full attention.
Outside, a man threw a rock and it hit the buffershield on the outer wall, causing it to bounce back and hit a woman in the leg.
The crowd screamed four percent louder and Oberon suspected that if Dr. Pan were to read their vitals blood pressure would be rising.
The Center would be very difficult to breach, but he now counted the protesters’ chances at higher than .09%.
His analytic function hiccupped as his primary directive stole focus for his subjects.
Stark was pacing furiously and Olivia was expressing her doubts to Dr. Oppyx.
Oberon was going to have to let go of the dream of making them fall in love, and settle for encouraging them to bond.
He had never had an issue with this part of the process. Generally, subjects were delighted to have conceived and happily spent the remainder of their time together feeding the female’s naturally big appetite and dreaming about what the little one might look like.
Now, in addition to securing a Center under siege, Oberon would have to get these two to stop being angry and care about each other.
