Free Tekgrrl by A. J. Menden Page A

new clearance.
    “I have a bad feeling about this,” Wesley said. “Whenever the government steps in, that usually leads to trouble.”
    We all felt the weight of his words and experience.
    “We don’t know enough yet to have a bad feeling about anything,” Paul spoke up.
    “We know that Simon Leasure’s in charge, which ought to tell you something,” Wesley said.
    Kate gave a soft laugh. “It’s going to be poorly run and highly publicized?”
    “It can’t be trusted,” Wesley corrected.
    “Simon wasn’t all bad,” I put in, feeling like I should defend him. “He did save my life.”
    “Mindy’s right,” Luke spoke up. “Let’s not judge someone by one mistake they made.”
    Wesley snorted. “One?”
    “Let’s just wait until we know more about the situation before jumping to conclusions,” Paul said. “Though I do have to agree that if Simon’s in charge, I worry.”
    I glanced at Lainey, who gave me a knowing look. If Paul was agreeing with Wesley, this was the apocalypse.
    Toby walked back into the room. “He’s in an executive meeting right now, probably with Simon, but his secretary said he could be available to speak with us right after.”
    “Great, set it up,” Paul said, and Toby nodded and spoke into his cell phone again, walking back out of the room. “We’ll reconvene later.”
    “Are all of your meetings like this?” Selena asked as she, Lainey and I exited the room.
    “Well, sometimes we know things,” I joked.
    “And sometimes we actually have criminals to fight,” Lainey added.
    Having time to kill before the next meeting, I decided to do the one thing that would make me happy: go work in my lab. Grabbing a bottle of water out of the kitchen and downing another migraine pill—my head was better but still not 100 percent—I headed for the elevator and scanned my ID badge into the reader that would allow me access. In a moment, the elevator dinged, and I entered my lab, donning a clean lab coat as I walked, my boot heels clicking in the silence.
    To say my laboratory was state of the art is an understatement. I had things in there that would make the top technology specialists in the country weep with joy at just being able to touch them. Things that my own hands had created, things that followed me back from my off-planet travels, both as a child and again with the EHJ, were littered everywhere.
    I stepped up to the gray table in the center of the room that held my latest project, a transporter that would hopefully work like a gun: point and shoot. Instead of ending up dead, a criminal would end up in a cell in a maximum-security prison, unharmed. At least, it would if calibrated right. I had been testing it on plants, trying to transport them from one side of the room to the other, but something was making the transporter go wonky, and the plants were ending up on the other side of the room with their planters shattered and their buds ripped off. Not exactly unharmed.
    I sighed as I got a similar result—the poor geranium—and got out some tools to work on the gun.
    Before my first space travel (which I don’t like to dwell on, as you know) I was a precocious child, maybe even a prodigy, but I wasn’t this smart. I might have grown up to be a scientist like my parents and worked with a team to create something like this after months of planning and testing; but after my time with the aliens, suddenly I could just dream it up and start building on any Saturday night when nothing was on television and I was dateless. It happened all the time.
    Something changes when I start working, however. It’s like I go into a trance: My fingers and hands seem to move of their own accord, and my mind processes things of which not even I am aware. Hours will pass without me realizing, I’ll skip meals and forget about bathroom breaks until whatever I’m working on is done. I always come to with an aching bladder, a rumbling stomach, and the realization that it’s now