"How long do boys usually act up during puberty?" Mar Black asked. He had just about had it with his son's rebellious behaviour. It started with Alex keeping secrets from him, while he used to tell him everything. Then he'd somehow managed to sabotage the listening equipment all around the house, which made it pretty clear that he'd discovered their existence, yet didn't mention them at all. There were strange energy surges all over town, which he suspected Alex had something to do with and now he'd pulled the battery from his phone?!
"I don't know. It depends on the boy," Erika, his fellow researcher said, a petite woman with long ginger hair, brown eyes and heavy black rimmed glasses, which made her look permanently stern. "Some barely show any symptoms at all, and others never quite get over it."
"How I hate this woman," Mar thought. As usual, she'd given an answer without solving the problem. Sadly enough, he couldn't fire her because she was a really good researcher. To be exact, she was the second-lead researcher.
"Computer?" Mar asked instead and waited for the telltale ping to notify him that the system was listening. "How long does puberty usually take for boys?"
The computer pinged again, to notify him that it had registered a question and after a few seconds of silence, a female voice answered: "An average of 5 years."
"Thank you, computer," Mar said as he gave his colleague a disdainful look. She rolled her eyes at him in return. Then the answer the computer had given him sunk in. "Shit, five years? That means this is only the start?!"
"Well, if he's anything like you, that's going to be tough," Erika said with a note of amusement to her voice.
"Shouldn't you have found the source of the power fluctuations by now?" Mar snapped sourly, knowing full-well what kind of a teen he'd been himself.
"I have, but the data doesn't make any sense," Erika said as she pressed some keys on the keyboard and a few graphs appeared on the presentation-screen. "The energy-level of Project 3 has plummeted a few hours ago and the boy's energy-levels have been fluctuating badly in the past four hours. He's gone from energy-levels we've never seen before to nearly nothing at least once per hour."
"Extreme highs in combination with lows," Mar mumbled as he watched the data. "Can you show a timeline of project 3's energy-levels in relation to those of Alex for the past 8 hours."
Erika typed and clicked furiously on the computer, and a new graph appeared within minutes on the screen. Like this it was pretty clear what was happening.
"He's charging project 3," Mar mumbled mesmerised.
"Charging project 3?!" Erika yelled in surprise. "But how can this be? How did he know where to find it? And… does this mean they are compatible?"
"No, those are the wrong questions," Mar said as he pointed to the first energy drop of project 3. "The real questions are: What happened here and why is he so desperate to fix it?"
In thought he added a third question: "And why is he trying to hide it from me?"
Mar and Erika were both chewing on the newly acquired data, when the live graph suddenly received new data that dwarfed all the previous peeks so much the scale of the graph had to be recalculated.
"What's happening?" Mar asked.
"It has to be some sort of system failure. There's no way the boy would survive such high energy-levels," Erika said and started typing and clicking away at the computer again and the screen flickered.
"What are you doing Alex?" Mar thought to himself, worry putting up the hackles in his neck.
"I've rebooted the system," Erika announced and they both looked up to the graph they had been looking at previously. Now Alex's energy levels were back to normal and project 3's were higher than they'd ever been before. Relief washed over Mar.
"There was no system failure," Mar said, a note of proudness to his voice. "He did it! He recharged project 3 in one go!"
"T-this is an amazing discovery!" Erika said excitedly. "But where did he get that huge amount of energy in such a short amount of time? He'd clearly needed a lot of time to reach the levels of the previous peeks, but this last one was nearly instant!"
"I'm going over there," Mar said as he grabbed his coat from the hanger and started to shrug it on.
"No! Sir! You can't! If you go there, he'll know we're monitoring him and he might try to boycott the measuring equipment again," Erika said as she obstructed his path.
"Erika, you can get out of my way, right now, or I can make you move. Your choice," Mar said, his voice so icy it nearly froze Erika over.
"Please don't sir," she said with a slight tremble to her voice. "I know you love your son dearly and that you're worried about him right now, but this is the first real progress we've had in years. You'll jeopardise the whole project!"
Mar was practically growling now.
"And what do you think will happen if Alex is flatlining again and I'm not there to reanimate him? Hu?!"
Erika didn't get the chance to answer though, because the system suddenly started blaring: "Alarm! Target lost! All traces of project 2 have vanished. Repeat, Target lost!"
Mar glanced over his shoulder to the graph. That wasn't the only thing that had happened. Project 3's energy-levels had dropped again, just like they had a few hours ago. That, in combination with the fact that the line that showed Alex's energy levels had been briskly cut off, made Mar's blood run cold with fear.
"Move," Mar growled to Erika who was still standing in his path. This time, she quickly jumped out of the way and Mar ran out of the door.