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Four

  Kandhi Clarke had been paying close attention. As Chief Officer for the WWA Testing Division, Zoey Bridges was of special interest to her. Kandhi had been the first to discover Zoey and her talents. It had happened quite by accident. Kandhi and her mother were having coffee at one of their favorite spots and happened to overhear a conversation at the next table, a discussion between Zoey and another unidentified female on the subject of black box testing. Zoey had put together quite a theory and was making a case for intuition over planning although, it must be said to her credit, she did not deny the importance of the latter, only that the former tended to uncover the most pernicious defects. Planning undoubtedly led to bases being covered, i's being dotted and t's being crossed, but intuition delved below the surface and hit the rare gold more often than not.

  Her companion argued a cost-benefit analysis, that the rare breed of intuitive tester could not be relied upon in the aggregate, and that therefore it was wiser to develop a comprehensive course of action. Zoey did not disagree, but asserted that in her case, you could have both. Kandhi ventured to interrupt and joined them at their table. She discovered nothing interesting in the other woman, who struck her as a bland, vanilla type engineer, but Zoey, there was promise there. Kandhi had been one of the original members of WWA, the third employee to be precise, after the two founders, one of whom was the legendary Chris.

  She was not the greenhorn she had once been when the company had first got off the ground. She was older, of course, and more mature, though she still sported her spiky pink hair and a random assortment of piercings. The new Kandhi was a serious person who handled her responsibilities responsibly. She had been the original tester of some of their first devices and had developed some ideas of her own when it came to quality assurance. She was certain that Zoey was on to something, but from her own experience knew that such talents were untrainable. One had to be born with it, gifted. Kandhi had come across only one or two others in that line of work until then. She gathered Zoey's contact information and promised to get in touch.

  First, however, she did a little research of her own. In a matter of days she had a complete dossier and personality profile compiled on the subject of Zoey Bridges, only child, mathematics major in college. Zoey had stumbled into software testing after a temp job at Micro Microware turned into something more. At M and M (as they styled themselves), Zoey had been charged with validating the initial findings of the development team, that the intelliprobe they had released into its chamber had indeed acquired the volcanic-bacteria-sensing tissue they'd intended it to. In order to accomplish this task, Zoey had to depend upon a sophisticated measuring device, and the more she used that machine, the more suspicious she became about its reliability. She conducted offline experiments which were not authorized by the division, and the company was not amused. She reported numerous deficiencies in the tool and concluded that M and M had wasted their money and that the entire project could not be validated by any means whatsoever.

  She was fired from that job, but the makers of the device, Ensuwalla Mektron, hired her as a special consultant while they went back to the drawing board. She enjoyed the whole special consultant thing and soon branched out, offering her services to makers of other scientific devices. One success followed another, and soon her career had led into the world of personal electronic communications and other consumer enterprises. She had established a reputation, not only as a skilled and talented consultant, but also as an almost unbelievably bland and boring person. Kandhi had never before encountered anyone as dull.

  Zoey was indeed on the socialnet (this was almost required for people of her generation), but her personal revelations were embarrassingly tedious, unrelieved by even a cute kitten video or quilting pattern. Her most original contributions to the worldly online super-culture was a periodic listing of cracks in neighboring sidewalks, a paean to the virtues of wax beans (they were yellow, and beanie), and a brief discussion on the brevity of precise midnight. Kandhi eventually contracted with Zoey to test a well-known and thoroughly tested WWA device, only to discover that Zoey was indeed everything she bragged of being. She uncovered seven priority-one defects in the device in the first two days she possessed it.

  Since then, Kandhi had not hesitated to hire Zoey for even alpha level testing. It was expensive to go that route, but had proven worth it. She had brought Chris into the picture, hoping to provoke a better sense of Zoey's character, which up until then presented itself as what-you-see-is-what-you-get: thoroughly bland yet continually astounding. Kandhi could not fathom how such an uninteresting person could yield such important results. After several contracts, Kandhi was more than satisfied with Zoey's work, but she still didn't completely trust her. She'd hoped that Chris would help to crack the icy exterior, but so far he hadn't produced the desired effect. Zoey was still an enigma. She had fallen under Chris' spell, of course, but all that brought about was a great deal of stammering and awkward telephone recordings. Kandhi wanted more. She wanted to crack her wide open, find out what was really going on inside, but now it seemed she was even lying to Chris. There had to be an explanation.

  She had picked Zoey especially for this assignment. Now or never, Zoey girl, she thought to herself as she shipped the curious device, and from that day on had been monitoring her every move. Zoey didn't know just how closely she was being observed. Kandhi noted with satisfaction how Zoey had gone through her paces, had attempted to pick and pry at the thing, had followed instructions and yet worked around them. Zoey had done everything possible, everything that ought to be done, and when the device had completed its work, it reported to her that Zoey had fulfilled her commitment. She had packed the thing up and taken it down to Gone Postal, and that was the end of the line.

  Kandhi was eager to see its report, but the device didn’t arrive as expected. Something had gone wrong along the way. She checked with the shipper and discovered, with more than dismay, that the package was lost. It had "experienced an exception.” Quickly she scanned the tracking tables and saw the same listings that Zoey had previously noted: San Antonio, Sonora, Balmorhea and Las Cruces, and finally, Ledman Storage and Pickup, in Wetford, Arizona. Kandhi rapidly checked with the airlines. There was a flight to L.A., then to Phoenix, from where it was only a two hour drive to that warehouse destination. She could get there by mid-morning, if she moved fast enough. There was no time to lose, because this was no ordinary package.