Ahead of its release in my Random Origins short story collection, I will preview Cyber Radio for my readers as part of my ongoing #SaturdayScenes initiative. Make sure you join my Reader’s Club to get the other free stories I offer to my subscribers, and to get further notifications regarding the release of Random Origins and future stories!

Cynthia Spencer sniffed the air. “Is that—”

“Popcorn,” Martin Spencer replied.

“Seriously?”

He shrugged and shot her a smirk. “Hey, at least he didn’t use fish.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t get it, could she? Martin tried not to let it bother him. She was stiff. Square. Julian was right about that.

They rounded a corner. The smell of popcorn—burned, no doubt about it—got stronger. Martin tried not to let that bother him either.

She let out an exasperated sigh, as if with it she could blow away the foul buttered-corn fumes.

“Still think the twenty percent time is a good idea?” she said.

There she went, into another of her do-loop, rewind-and-replay conversations. Yes, he’d thought it would be a good idea to let engineers do their own project twenty percent of the time, one day a week if they worked a five day week, even though many of them came in on weekends to innovate as their inspiration led them. No matter how much he told Cynthia that other Silicon Valley companies had instituted similar programs, only to find the lion share of their innovation came from self-initiated creative efforts, she couldn’t see it. Too square. Too stiff. Too by the book. And to boot, as Chief Financial Officer, too in charge of the books.

Martin left it at, “It will be over soon.” He almost said she didn’t have to be there, but that wouldn’t exactly satisfy her. Julian’s self-initiated project was burning a pretty penny. All of it came from InfoStream’s coffers, pure R&D budget, which in turn burned Cynthia. But she and Martin kept a tacit agreement between them: bend backwards to keep Julian on the rails and motivated.

“As long as that includes Julian’s stay here,” she said.

He wouldn’t answer that. Like he’d done before when she had brought up the topic of Julian’s eventual departure, he kept himself non-committal. The thought of discarding Julian once they got what they needed from him didn’t sit well with Martin. Was that because he’d started to care for Julian, because he still needed Julian’s expertise, or because Martin feared they might do the same with him? He didn’t care to dwell on the question.

The elevators came up on the right. Martin didn’t bother to ask. Miss Fitness would want to take the stairs, so he followed Cynthia to the stairwell. With each step down, the smell of the popcorn intensified.

“God, let’s go get the gas masks,” Cynthia said.

Martin ignored her. They rounded the first turn, and the scene below came into view. Half of InfoStream’s employees stood around, holding oily red-white striped bags, tossing kernels of popcorn into their mouths. A few of them noticed Cynthia and Martin. Some turned away. A couple gave them sheepish smiles.

“Whoa, boss man is here,” Julian shouted from across the room. He made a wide waving motion with his free arm, strong enough that the aluminum foil hat on his head almost fell off before he rushed to stabilize it.

Cynthia shot Martin a sideways glare.

Martin waved back at Julian. “Is it demo time yet?”

“Dude. It’s always demo time.”

Julian slid over to a long foldout table where he had set up his gear. A laptop sat on one end of the table, and on the other… a microwave oven? Martin squinted. Yeah, the front of the black object had all the markings of a microwave oven, complete with blinking digital display. Martin would have kept his attention there, if not for Cynthia nudging him.

“What’s Stan doing here?”

Martin frowned at her. “Huh?”

“Stan Beloski, over there.”

He followed her gaze. As she’d indicated, Stan Beloski, one of the government customer representatives from the Information Technology Assurance Agency, or ITAA, stood there, socializing with a couple of young female engineers.

Martin grasped the import of Cynthia’s question, and her implied concern became his.

The government team descended on InfoStream every two months, on even months, second week of the month—deuces wild, as some joked. They came for bi-monthly management reviews, the BMR, or the “Beamer,” as most liked to pronounce it, with fully intended pun about the German car with the same nickname. But this was an odd month, so what was one of ITAA’s team—and not a junior guy—doing in Milpitas, California? And what in the world had drawn him to Julian’s demo bash?

Before he could answer that, someone handed him a party hat.

“Careful,” the guy said. “The foil is sharp.”

Aluminum foil and all, Martin found no better alternative than to put it on. Julian grinned at him from the other side of the room. Then he waved for Martin to approach. By the time Martin got to the table and turned around, Stan Beloski had moved over to stand by Cynthia. He was nodding at her, a wide smile on his face. She was smiling at him, keeping the customer happy.

“OK, some of us have to get back to work,” Martin said.

Nervous laughter erupted around the room. Did the big boss mean that? Had he lost enthusiasm for encouraging his employees to innovate as they saw fit on company-paid time and with company-procured resources?

Martin flashed as cool and relaxed a smile as he could muster. Whether it helped or not, he couldn’t tell.

“All right,” Julian shouted. “What we have us here is a practical application of Mr. Maxwell himself. Short and sweet, currents make magnetic fields and magnetic fields make currents. The trick is to make currents that do what we want them to do.” He gestured toward an adjacent table, where red-white striped, bulging popcorn bags stood in tight, stuffed formation. “After all, we wouldn’t have all this buttery popcorn if it weren’t for good ol’ microwave energy, right?”

Though tempted to note popcorn, buttery or otherwise, existed long before man harnessed microwave energy, Martin nodded and smiled.

Julian kept on. “In other words, I didn’t pick a microwave oven as my hackable target by coincidence. Pun intended all the way, man.”

A few laughed around the room. Most nodded and smiled. Except for Cynthia. Well, she held the sort of smile that had nothing real behind it.

Martin nodded, this time hard enough that he had to reach up to keep the foil-covered party hat from slipping off his head.

As if in solidarity, Julian adjusted his own hat and stepped toward his laptop.

“OK, enough mumbo-jumbo intro,” he said. “Today’s demo tests the following hypothesis: when it comes to air-gapping of computerized equipment, nothing’s off-grid unless its power is totally off.”

At that moment, Martin noticed Stan Beloski straightening up and taking a half step forward to get a better look.

Julian pointed at the microwave. “You will notice the clock on our dear microwave is blinking. Why? Because like many microwaves in our homes, the owner is too lazy, or stupid, to set the time.”

A few giddy chuckles ebbed and flowed through the room.

“But what if I tell you I can execute a script on my laptop to fix that?” Julian waited.

Martin frowned and squinted. He walked around the table, by the microwave, looking for how Julian had wired his demo. His eyes stopped scanning where the oven’s power cord met an orange extension cord. On the microwave itself, as far as Martin could tell, no remote devices, wired or otherwise, connected the appliance to Julian’s computer.

He grinned at Julian. “OK, you got me curious.”

Julian smirked back, waved an index finger in the air, then brought it down to press the laptop’s Enter key.

The microwave oven beeped. All heads snapped to it. The clock no longer flashed. Martin checked his watch, which he synchronized to his computer’s clock every morning. The time matched perfectly. No doubt Julian’s script drew the time from his own laptop, which like all InfoStream computers synchronized to atomic clock time every six hours.

“Nice trick,” Martin said.

Julian grinned back. “Yeah, but boring, right?”

“A little.” Martin looked out to the room. Everyone but Cynthia and Stan Beloski smiled back. Cynthia’s expression featured a frown. Stan’s gave off a measure of curiosity.

Julian stepped up and gestured to the crowd. “OK, then. I’ll now have my lovely assistant insert a popcorn package into our hackable target.”

A young female engineer stepped up, packet in hand. She pointed and gestured at the packet with all the flare of a gameshow hostess.

“Would you mind telling me how much time I should set it for?” Julian asked.

She mock-read from the package. “Why, it says between two and two and half minutes, sir.”

“Very well, then,” Julian replied, matching her formal tone. “We shall set it for the midpoint, two minutes and fifteen seconds.”

He twirled his index finger again, pressed the enter key, and the microwave beeped three times, then a pause, followed by a fourth beep. A hum came from it next, and its internal light came on. Martin leaned over the table to see. Yeah, the turntable had gone into its slow spin.

“OK,” he said, and took a harder look.

This time he traced the length of the orange extension cord. It wound its way toward Julian, passing by him on its way to the plug on the wall. But Martin’s gazed snapped back to a section under the table, and right under Julian’s laptop. Martin went to it. He crouched down for a closer look.

A coil of medium gage orange-coated wire wrapped around the extension cord. Martin traced it up, to a small box next to the laptop. It connected the laptop through one of its ports. He looked up at Julian.

“Don’t worry, boss. I didn’t break any security rules by going wireless. Well, not the way the security guide says. I checked. Sort of.”

Martin shook his head and grinned. “Clever.” He stood up to notice Stan Beloski had come up.

Leaning on the table with a grin of his own, he said, “How about we neck down for a quick meeting.”

“Oh? What’s the agenda?” Martin said.

Stan eyed Julian, then brought his gaze back to Martin. “I think we all know.”

Martin straightened out, feeling the playful grin fall off his lips. He turned to Julian. Well, that somewhat explained why Stan had come all the way from DC. Now Martin needed to get the full story.

They found a small vacant conference room. Cynthia came in last, after going back to her office to cancel an afternoon meeting. She closed the door behind her and sat down.

She eyed Stan. “So tell me again what brings you to sunny Milpitas?”

“Like I said earlier. You guys aren’t the only company with ITAA contracts.”

Martin caught Cynthia’s gaze. Did they have competitors in the area? Somehow Martin doubted that. The ITAA liked keeping things quiet and in the black. Minimizing the number of contracts it let out helped them do that. At least that’s what they’d told Martin when he signed on.

Stan shrugged. “And since I was local, why not give my favorite contractor a visit? It makes for more effective taxpayer-funded travel budget usage, right?”

Martin shot Julian a look. Julian avoided Martin, choosing instead to examine his fingernails. No point in asking Julian if he’d contacted Stan, Martin decided.

Martin turned back to Stan. “You said you had something to pitch?”

Stan held up a finger trio. “Three words. Air-gapped networks.”

Martin glanced over at Julian. Now he was soundlessly drumming his fingers on the table.

“I’ve heard them,” Martin said.

Stan eyed Julian. “It sounds like someone on your team has also.”

“You know how things work, Stan,” Cynthia put in. “You guys send us a request for proposal. We bid it. You review it, we negotiate it, you turn us on, and the magic happens.”

“I’m not jump-circuiting the process.”

She waved at nothing in particular. “We’ve been doing a lot of work to give structure to our operation, Stan.”

“Like letting your employees free-wheel on their own projects?” Stan said.

The way Stan said that and smirked, Martin didn’t take it like a putdown. Looking over at Cynthia, however, he saw nothing but affront written all over her face.

“That is purely company-paid Research and Development, Stan.” Cynthia’s eyes fired up. Her right eyebrow pushed up. “We have a right to fund our own internal R&D.”

Martin nodded. That was something, right there, Cynthia defending the very employee self-initiated R&D she’d disdained bitterly and often.

Stan smiled. “Relax, OK? I get what you guys are doing. Trying to stimulate innovation and employee satisfaction.” He shrugged. “I’m all for that. And look what we have here, an intersection of that self-initiated R&D and a real-world mission need.”

“Yes.” Cynthia shot Julian a sideways glare. “Quite the intersection.” She aimed the same look in Martin’s direction.

He gave her a subtle nod. He had this. “So what are we into here? Threat assessment, or something more offensive.”

Stan grinned. He rested his hands on the table and intertwined his fingers. “Yes.”

“Will we get that in writing?” Cynthia said.

“I can put a prototype together in no time, no problem,” Julian threw in.

Martin tamped down the air. “Before we start building stuff, we need some concrete requirements. Paint us the bullseye, and we’ll have something to aim for.”

“And send money,” Cynthia said.

Stan raised his hands. “Hey, I get all that, guys. Let’s work it together. We’re a team, right?”

“Yeah,” Julian said. “Let’s work it. Like a team. We’re all good here.”

Cynthia let out one of her gust sighs. “We have a process, Julian.”

“Whoa. This just got mondo awkward.” Julian stood up. He raised his hands “How about I go chomp on some popcorn, and you guys get back to me when you got it all sorted out.”

Cynthia barked back something or other about how it was the government that drove process. And standards. How their very regulations mandated structure. But Julian was already gone, the conference room’s door slamming behind him.

Julian knew how this would go. He knew it the moment Cynthia asked for a request for proposal and the funding that went with it. He knew two months later when he’d heard nothing about the request having come in. He knew it three months later when, after finally asking him what was going on with “that thing,” Martin knew exactly what Julian meant without further explanation.

Yeah, Martin caught on to shake his head and squeeze his lips like one does at a funeral expressing his condolences. “No funding. Sorry.”

And there it went. Like popcorn when it gets cold, Julian’s idea and the juice he got from it went stale. Julian gave Martin a one shoulder shrug and went home early. When he got up the next morning, he looked at himself in the mirror, and he asked the tired guy looking back why in the hell he’d want to go punch a clock. Even if there was no clock.

Instead of getting dressed, he made himself some coffee, toasted a bagel, and took both to the living room. There he turned on the TV and flopped on the couch. On his laptop, he searched for places to go. Doing his best to find something random and unpredictable, he decided on one location in particular.

He didn’t book his plane tickets online. Rather, he saw what flights he wanted, and an hour later, with cash in hand, he bought his tickets at the airport. He kept looking over his shoulder and scanning the terminal. No one came. As he’d figured, no one expected it. His flight pushed off at 9:45 AM. As the plane took off, Julian promised himself: no more popcorn.