Slow and Speedy Win the Fight

89. Origins

Haresa

"You're telling me that you use a teleporting watch to travel to school and home and you just have those two locations?" I asked Sheldon.

"Yeah."

"You could use the watch to travel anywhere in the world and yet you only use it to get to and from school as fast as possible?"

"No, it cannot teleport anywhere I want. I would need to log in coordinates and that takes a bit of time since it can't be done on the spot. If I could teleport anywhere with a few taps of a button then there's the risk of being teleported somewhere on accident."

"But still."

"Still what?"

I used my fingers to smooth the creases of the bridge of my nose and exhaled. "Okay, you know what? Never mind. Just tell me how's the progress going with the box thing."

"I don't understand why it's so weird to you but fine," Sheldon held up the microchip for me to see. "See this?"

"Yes," I said.

"Do you know what it's called?"

"Yes," I sighed in exasperation. "We don't have to go through this step by step like I'm a four-year-old."

Sheldon leaned back onto the table and crossed his arms. His eyes scanned me up and down and I could feel his doubt radiating off of him.

"I'm not as dumb as you thought I was when we were kids," I said with my fingers an inch away from pulling my hair out.

"Nearly drowned."

"I'm a professional that's willing to take risks. Not an idiot."

Sheldon seemed to relent and went back to the table to tend to the device again. As he worked on it, he moved his head slightly to the side with a hint of a smile on his face. "Smeared blueberries on my stomach."

"Okay, now you're just teasing me."

He didn't deny or confirm my statement as he continued to put the microchip into his watch. "So, the microchip should have some security precautions to it if they weren't stupid. They might have certain geolocations blocked as well since it's harder to navigate this thing without it. I made this thing before I learned how to make a section where default locations could be chosen and the number of options on this gets super tedious when it has locations all over the globe. And I was meticulous so every possible teleportation location is one hundred feet from each other."

"Wouldn't so much data overload it?"

"A phone or laptop has more complicated coding than this thing. It's fairly straightforward and doesn't need to have any fancy displays, just the numbers that the locations represent. It was so easy that I decided that I might've used it to teleport to the middle of the ocean too so literally everywhere is possible with this thing," Sheldon explained. "It might be why it was only good for up to three uses and then it needs a full-out repair session which took me about a week."

"That sounds like a waste," I said.

"It was, which was why it was a prototype." Sheldon carefully placed the microchip onto a glass plate. "It makes sense that they reserved it for emergency escapes."

After he seemed to pick out specks of metal from the microchip before he inserted it into a slot in his watch. He fiddled with it for a few minutes and I just stood in silence as I watched him. He was really good at his job despite so many years of inactivity now that I thought of it.

"You don't have to be here for this part you know," Sheldon mumbled, his fingers still tapping on the screen. "It's going to take some time before I find anything on this thing."