The Other Side of Nowhere Read Online Free PDF

did. She slid her ID along the card-reader and the red light turned green. I heard a click and he door opened. We went inside.
    “This is where we keep all the electronics and equipment we don’t get around to using in the lab. There might be something here.”
    “For what?” I asked. “It’s not like I know how to use any of this, and you’re no expert.”
    “How many times are you going to assume you know what I do ?” She asked, rolling her eyes. “For Heaven’s sake, pay attention.” She started rummaging through the boxes and shelves of equipment. I hardly recognized a thing, except for the occasional computer monitor or hard drive.
    “What are you looking for?” I asked, standing there like a confused child.
    She stopped, pulled out a sealed brown box with no labels on it and shoved it in my arms. “How big do you think Jonah’s program is?” she asked.
    “How the hell am I supposed to know?”
    “Right, well, he’s about a petabyte. Maybe. Hell, he’s probably a couple petabytes, but maybe we’ll get lucky.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “This is a portable drive. A rather expensive, military-grade drive that can hold about one and a half petabytes of data.”
    “A petabyte?”
    She groaned at my ignorance. “It doesn’t matter. Look, we can put Jonah on these two drives, then combine them later.”
    “Combine them later?” I echoed. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
    “Maybe I am,” she said.
    “Leslie, what you’re suggesting could get you fired.”
    “It’ll be worse than that,” she corrected. “This is technically treason. It’s the military, remember?”
    “Holy smokes,” I muttered.
    She went on. “We’ll need to find a large enough computer, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem if we build it ourselves.”
    “You mean if you build it.”
    “Sure, right, you’re an idiot. I forgot.”
    “You think this will work? What if he can’t be merged back together?”
    She paused. “I guess we won’t know until we try.”
    “Hold on, wait,” I said, taking a step back. “We can’t do this, can we?”
    “He’s a living creature, James. If we don’t do anything, we’re letting him die.”
    I stood there for a while, running through every scenario in my head. I imagined getting caught and thrown in a cell. I pictured my inevitable trial. A firing squad. My funeral. The whole thing could go very bad, very quickly.
    But Leslie was right. Jonah was alive. He was real. I’d said as much in my report. He was good and kind. Better than almost any other human I’d ever met. I couldn’t let him die. I couldn’t walk away. “Okay,” I said, embracing my own stupidity. “Just tell me what to do.”
    ******
    Leslie and I entered Jonah’s room to inform him of our plan. He didn’t wait for us. “There is a flaw in your plan.”
    “Hey,” Leslie said. “How did you know we had a plan?”
    “He’s got a really nice set of ears,” I told her. I looked back at the computer. “What kind of flaw, Jonah?”
    “There’s nothing you can do about it, but don’t worry. I will take care of it.”
    I didn’t like that, but I didn’t argue. Leslie insisted we hurry, so we did. She inserted the drives and typed a command into the terminal. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do this without setting off a few alarms,” she said. “We might not get very far.”
    “The internal alert system has been disabled,” said Jonah.
    “How? You shouldn’t have access to do that.”
    “It seems Jonah’s a bit more capable than we gave him credit for,” I said.
    “Indeed,” said Jonah.
    It took about twenty minutes to download the entire program onto the two drives. Jonah explained that all we had to do was insert them into a computer with enough space and his program would do the rest. It was good news for me because I really didn’t want to be responsible for screwing it all up with an accidental mouse click. You’d think someone with a PhD