Following the Mixer

Gray went and had dinner with everyone else after talking with Major Valen. Gray went to see what everyone else was doing and found everyone but Geoff lounging around the mess hall.

"Geoff doing something?" Gray asked when the group noticed him returning.

"Yeah! That traitor! He didn't even eat any food then said he something to do and left us!" Yurika complained

"How does that make him a traitor?" Gray asked slightly confused.

"We have deduced that it is a female that he is leaving for as Geoff only gets this excited for women." Caleb said analytically, then added "Plus we heard the voice of a girl on the other end of the call."

"Hmmm, maybe it was Beth?" Gray thought and then considered messaging Spoon or Carly to ask if they knew, but Gray decided not to as everyone is allowed their own private life.

"Hey, want to follow him and see where he's going?!?" Yurika said excitedly

"Not really, let him be if he's going on a date or something."

"What if he is going to get lucky before you, Paul, or Caleb?" Yurika said with a devious expression on her face.

"I am quite satisfied with my love life" Caleb said proudly

"True, you probably created your own AI girlfriend..." Gray said jokingly

"What's wrong with that?"

"Well, nothing I guess if that is what you are in to... If you remember what we learned earlier from Major Valen, Dr. Sara Watts is now an AI so I guess that makes her a human without a physical body." Gray thought of something odd regarding AI and then asked. "Do you suppose Dr. Sara Watts is the only human turned AI?"

"Honestly I doubt it given that even I do not like the idea of giving up my physical body for a more incorporeal form. Would I still be able to learn and grow outside of my set parameters? AI can learn, but they can not grow as far as I am aware. I can teach an AI to sing, it can then learn more songs on its own and adjust its style to match each song, but it can't become a better singer than what I programmed it to be. The issue we have is we just don't know enough about it." Caleb said while shaking his head

"Us as in humans or us as in just us?"

"A bit of both, but in this case it is more just us. Dr. Sara Watts pioneered artificial neural networks for consciousness transferring which is the foundation for true artificial intelligence. Honestly, the best thing to do would be if we could ask Dr. Sara Watts ourselves."

Suddenly a thought seemed to dawn on Stacia and she whispered to Yurika next to her, both of them started giggling and finally Yurika pointed at Caleb and announced "We finally found something you admit not knowing about!"

Caleb rolled his eyes and then thought for a moment. "Ahem, I had said 'we just don't know enough about it' and not 'we just don't know anything about it', therefore that implies that I do know at least something about it, just not enough to be able to answer your question."

"Sounds like a cop out" Gray said

"Total cop out..." Paul agreed

"We totally found something!" Stacia said excitedly.

Caleb looked at Gray, Stacia, and Yurika smiling back at him with an expression of victory on their faces and finally admitted "...Fine, we'll go with it being something I don't have knowledge of. I'll send you 3 the reward I had already predetermined in the event you happened to find something."*

"Oh! Tell me! Tell me! What is it?" Yurika said excitedly.

"You'll get it later tonight, I can't send it from here."

"Fine with us, right?" Yurika said all smiles and nodding to both Gray and Stacia. "On that note... let's go see what Geoff has planned!"

"Just leave him be!" Gray said again.

"We will! We just want to make sure he is safe, what if he's meeting a spy or assassin?!?"

Gray had to wonder about Yurika's upbringing sometimes, but he did admit her randomness was fun. "Fine... we'll just keep an eye on him to keep him safe, but not all of us can go..."

"I have no interest in this, I have some research to do now it seems." Caleb said

"... I want to get to bed early..." Xyra said in her usual very hard to hear soft voice

"I'm actually more interested in going to see some old friends tonight so I'll leave you guys to it." Paul said then walked off towards his quarters.

"So 3 of us, huh? I think we can pull it off."

Everyone got up and left the mess hall to head back to the dorms. Caleb, Paul, and Xyra returned to their own rooms, but Gray, Yurika, and Stacia went over to Geoff's room.

Gray knocked on the door and heard Geoff say "Just a second!" from behind it. Geoff opened the door momentarily after saying "Gray! Bro! Sorry for missing you at dinner, but I have other plans tonight that I needed to miss out on it!"

"That's fine, it's not like I control your life, you're free to do whatever you want outside of the team."

"I know, but I just feel bad because I didn't include you in on my plans for tonight."

"What are your plans?"

"That's... ummm... don't tell anyone else, but I'm going to a mixer arranged by Beth, it seems she was short one guy and I agreed to go with since I figured it would be easier to get to know her this way."

"You just met her and she already invited you to a mixer?"

"Well, she said the other 2 girls with her wouldn't be interested in me so we could consider it as a group date of sorts if I wanted to. As for the other 2 guys, she said they would be at Bar Jamiro in New Venice at 9pm."

Gray checked the time and saw it was 7:15 pm, "It takes about an hour to get there due to the bad roads remember, hope you have fun then, let me know how it goes!"

"I will dude! Wish me luck, I need to finish getting ready though and rent a truck again!"

Geoff closed the door and Gray turned to Stacia and Yurika. Judging from the way Stacia and Yurika's eyes were shining, Gray knew he could not talk them out of spying on Geoff anymore.

Gray sighed and said "Let's get a truck as well and beat him there!"

Gray, Yurika and Stacia hurriedly left the dorms to rent a truck and go visit Bar Jamiro in New Venice.

The attendant at the depot rented Gray a truck after taking 20 merits from him. Gray heard him mutter "That's the third truck tonight..." and was curious about the other 2. Gray assumed one of them was for Geoff, but he couldn't think of who the 3rd one would be, but Gray didn't think too hard on it as Gray was sure other players or soldiers would want to explore on their own.

Unfortunately for Gray, the only truck left was a standard cab pickup so it was a tight fit for Gray, Stacia, and Yurika to drive it up to New Venice. Since it was a manual transmission, only Gray and Yurika could drive it so Gray insisted on driving for them since he already knew the way and the thought of Yurika driving scared him honestly.

Yurika insisted on sitting in the middle between Stacia and Gray even though it wasn't very comfortable. With the 6 speed manual shifter on the floor, Gray would bump Yurika with it whenever he shifted into an even numbered gear. Yurika thought it was hilarious that she would do a fake moan whenever Gray hit her with the shifter and sometimes encourage Gray to shift harder or faster. Eventually both Gray and Stacia became numb to this so they tuned out the perv and chatted between themselves as if nothing was going on. Unfortunately this annoyed Yurika so after Gray and Stacia started ignoring her she resorted to fiddling with the radio.

After what felt like a very long and arduous drive, Gray, Stacia and Yurika arrived at the gate to New Venice. The same guard as last time recognized Gray and said "Welcome back! Where are you headed too tonight?"

"Bar Jamiro, if you can point us in the right direction." Gray replied.

"Yeah? That's a nice little bar, just follow this road East, it'll be the 2nd or 3rd block on your left."

"Thanks!"

Gray was about to drive off when the guard added "Just don't devour the food supply like you and your friend did last time!"

"..." Gray didn't say anything as Yurika and Stacia both stared at him and then had to ask the guard about it.

"Gray! What did he mean by that?" Stacia said with genuine concern

"It was nothing... Geoff and I just came here before and ate a lot of food, that's all."

The guard overheard this and said "Calling it 'a lot' of food is an understatement, they ordered more food in one sitting than what would normally feed two teams of football players!"

Gray drove away shamefully while the guard was still laughing. "At the time we still thought it was a game and wanted to see how much we could eat..." Gray was going to go with this story and stick to it.

Yurika and Stacia looked at each other, thought about it, then Yurika said "I guess I can see that, the fun part about games is seeing how far you can take certain things sometimes, like how high can you fly, or how fast can you drive... although eating seems a little weird, I can kind of understand it."

Gray was glad Yurika was an avid gamer so she would understand the logic more than Stacia.

Relieved that Yurika and Stacia didn't question it more, they finally arrived at Bar Jamiro. Checking the time, Gray saw it was 8:30 so they made good time. Gray went in to the bar first and didn't see Geoff or Beth so he figured none of them arrived early. Gray brought Yurika and Stacia in and they found a small table in a dimly lit corner where they could survey the rest of the bar without drawing attention to themselves.

10 minutes to 9, Beth arrived with 2 other girls that Gray couldn't recognize due to the poor lighting, but they both felt familiar. Geoff arrived shortly after them and sat across from Beth at the table the girls had picked. A second guy arrived, hesitated when he saw Geoff and Geoff's eyes showed an expression of surprise when he saw who the second guy was.

Gray couldn't see who the second guy was and only noticed that Geoff stiffened up, then Gray heard the second man speak and he immediately recognized the voice as well as Stacia and Yurika also recognizing it.

Gray, Stacia, and Yurika all looked at each other wide-eyed and had to hold their mouths shut to stop from blurting out. All 3 of them couldn't help but scream in their minds "HOLY @#$& ITS HIM!"