“Understood,” Hail said, giving Kara a little I’ll be done in a second smile.
“And the weirdest thing is her phone charger. It’s a sophisticated little Linux computer that has the potential of downloading data from any phone that gets plugged into it. It also has Wi-Fi and Ethernet and can even transmit on blue tooth, if that channel is open.”
“Good work,” Hail said.
Renner said, “All her stuff is locked up in the security center in a lead lined safe. Which means that none of her communication devices are doing any communicating as long as they are sealed inside our safe.”
“OK,” Hail said and clicked off the connection.
“Sorry about that,” he told Kara.
Kara shrugged and said, “This is really good food. If I didn’t know better, I would say I was in Italy.”
“Well, then we did our job.” Hail smiled.
Kara paused for a moment, one of those gear shifting silences that indicated she was going to change the subject.
“You mentioned that you had minors on the ship. That’s kind of weird.”
Hail was prepared for a change of subject, but that particular question caught him off guard.
Hail said in a defensive tone, “Not really if you understand why.”
Kara looked at him, smiled innocently and asked, “Why?”
Hail had to decide how much to share with the CIA. If Kara was on the ship for any amount of time, she would eventually meet most of the people aboard, most of them minors. He could always try to segregate her from the crew as well as his advanced technology. But he realized that he needed the CIA’s intelligence. He needed their help long term. It would be impractical to keep Kara bottled up for that long, however long ‘that long’ happened to be. And really, what could she tell her bosses that would affect Hail or his operation? Yes, he had drones that delivered drones that delivered drones that killed people. But without designs and specifications and people who knew what they were doing, the United States government would still take a decade to get up to speed if they developed their own program. Realistically, he didn’t want to control Kara while she was on his ship. What he did want to control was her communication with anyone who was not on his ship. Jarret Pepper to be exact.
Hail said, “What you’re going to discover is that the majority of our crew or staff or employees, whatever you want to call them, lost someone in The Five.”
Kara looked surprised but remained silent.
Hail let it sink in for a moment and then he continued.
“Sarah, for example,” Hail said nodding toward the kitchen. “She lost a brother that she was very close to in The Five. She was a waitress at the time and the loss crushed her. She didn’t get along well with her mother or father, but she was very close to her brother. She couldn’t function after that and lost her job. When I found her, she was living in a homeless shelter.”
Kara asked, “What do you mean you found her?”
Hail responded, “I mean that I assembled a team of researchers that did their best to track down all the Sarah’s in the world. Or more to the point, all the family members who were damaged or orphaned from The Five.”
“Orphaned?” Kara said, feeling that the conversation was drifting into a strange place.
“Yes,” Hail said without any reservation. “Most of the minors on the ship I mentioned were orphaned after The Five. I volunteered to take care of them, protect them, make sure they received schooling and even employ them when they get older. In many cases, I’m their official guardian.”
“Papa Hail,” Kara said with a degree of pessimism. “I don’t see it. Why would a Judge give you custody?”
Hail laughed mockingly. “There weren’t any other billionaires at the time that were making the same offer. Why would I be any worse than anyone else that could take care of them?”
Kara murmured something to herself that Hail couldn’t make out as she looked out the fake window.
“I don’t know,” she said in a sad voice, not taking her eyes off the cars that passed by. She noticed that it had started raining outside; outside an Italian restaurant on the other side of the world when this footage had been recorded.
Hail could tell that she was thinking about her own life and challenges she had faced.
“It’s really nice for the kids here,” Hail told her in a kind voice, almost fatherly. “They are in school Monday through Friday and we have our own teachers. For the kids over eighteen, they are taking college via distance learning. These days almost every college course is offered via video. One teacher and a hundred students watching the lesson via remote video connections all around the globe. It makes so much sense that I wonder how long brick and mortar colleges will actually last.”
“As long as colleges have kegger parties, then they will be around,” Kara mused. “It’s hard to do that over the Internet.”
Hail paused to see if Kara had anything else she wanted to say. She was still watching the rain shine the streets of Italy, miles away from the conversation.
“You need rain noise effects,” she said softly, like she wasn’t even aware that she was talking.
Hail chuckled. “Yeah, sure, we’ll get right on that.”
“I’m sure that everything you do for the kids is all well and good, but it’s not like having a mother and father. It’s not like having a family,” Kara said, returning from wherever her thoughts had been.
“I agree with you. It’s not like having a mother and father, but it’s like having a family. The kids on board have other kids to do things with. They are growing very close relationships with one another. We are their family. We are each other’s family. In a way, the kids are mine, but in another way they belong to everyone on this ship. We all belong to each other. We all lost something in The Five, but I will be damned if we all didn’t gain something from it as well. And what we gained is the ability to love again. The ability to feel something again other than sorrow. Having all the kids and adults that were damaged from The Five on board is like a mass therapeutic session. You don’t have to go home to a foster mother and father that don’t have a clue how you feel and don’t understand what you’re going through, because each of us on this ship are going through the exact same thing. We don’t have to go to a grocery store and have the cashier ask how our day is going. And we don’t have to tell them it’s going like shit and not getting any better. We don’t have to listen to people telling us to have a nice day. We have nice days when we feel like it. We don’t even have to talk about how we feel on the Nucleus. We just know. When someone is feeling down ― we just know. We know how they feel and we know how to respond to it.”
Hail stopped talking, realizing that he was rambling. But he didn’t feel guilty about it. If Kara didn’t get it, then she didn’t get it.
There were a lot of emotions going through Kara and Hail could almost see each one of them play out on her expressive features. The prevailing emotion she was revealing was sorrow. But as Hail was talking, that emotion began to change into an expression that resembled hope. It was like sensing that beyond that one mountain was a greener pasture. War and death on one side, and peace and solace on the other side. Hail knew she got it. He just didn’t know if she knew that she got it.
“What…” Kara began to say and then stopped.
“This is all just…” and she shut down again.