It was two floors, painted blue and trimmed white. It had a pointed metal fence, and a front yard with enough room for two big healthy trees.

  "Shit, he was loaded," I said.

  "What being smart and able to speak the language of tech bros will get you," said Beatrice, one-hundred percent unironically.

  "Surprised to hear you pay him a compliment."

  "Respect your enemies, or be made a fool. Says me anyways."

  I couldn't help but agree.

  "Place looks empty, not that I was expecting otherwise."

  "Yep."

  "Does he have a security system?"

  "Yeah, but I have the code."

  "Does it have a ring camera?"

  She nodded.

  "It does."

  "Then we'll have to find a way around it anyway. The moment it detects movement it'll ping him no matter what."

  "Is that really a problem?"

  "Probably not, but I'd prefer it if the guy that can rip metric tons of metal out of the ground didn't know my location."

  Beatrice did a shrug and a nod that seemed to say "good point".

  Asking her if she recalled the placement of any of the cameras as a base, I started to map out possible blind spots. She said there weren't any cameras on the inside of the house, and the company that Peabody was using didn't advertise indoor monitoring anyways, so once we were in we were safe.

  After I mapped out the blind spots in my mind, I told Beatrice, and started moving.

  We jumped over the pointed fence, taking care not to be impaled by the spikes. We did so behind one of the big trees in the front yard so as not to get caught by the camera that overlooked the front of the house. Our entry point was going to have to be a second floor window that overlooked the back of the house, so we hopped a white fence, and hugged a wall to stay within another camera's blind spot.

  Peabody had a hanging roof over the sliding door that opened up to his backyard, so, using a nearby gutter drain, we climbed and hopped onto the hanging roof. There we found our window.

  The window opened up to Peabody's bedroom, and as I passed through it, my Geiger counter started ticking away.

  That's not nearly as high as I expected, I thought, checking the readout.

  The room itself was spartan.

  A queen sized bed with the corners tucked in, a nightstand, a lamp, and a dresser. There was a distinct lack of personality. A sliding mirror, which was probably a closet door, took up a wall, and echoed back the stark emptiness of the room.

  "I can't tell if this is creepy, or just sad," I said.

  "It can be both," said Beatrice. "Where do we start looking?"

  "Just start poking around. We're looking for anything that might tell us where he's been holding up."

  "Got it."

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Beatrice started checking Peabody's dresser, so I checked the closet behind the sliding mirrors.

  The contents of the closet, like the rest of the room, were spare. A couple dozen white button up shirts, and cardigans, with lots of tan pairs of pants to go with them. Sitting at the bottom was a shoe box that felt very out of place.

  Opening it up, I found a shrink wrapped case of some small glass bottles. The shrink wrapping was torn, and the case, which was made to hold eight of the little glass bottles, was missing about three of them.

  I fished one of the bottles out of the packaging.

  Trichloromethane, read the bottle, and then in parenthesis: Chloroform.

  Chloroform wasn't the instant knockout solution it was in movies, but inhaling it for long enough would make you pass out.

  Peabody definitely wouldn't have had a problem holding someone down while he waited for them to pass out.

  I set the glass bottles back down, and checked on Beatrice.

  "Find anything?"

  "Not really," said Beatrice. "Just the most organized sock drawer on the planet. You?"

  "I found some chloroform."

  "Fuck," she said.

  "Yep."

  Beatrice and I didn't find anything else in the bedroom, so we moved on.

  "Two more rooms up here," I said, "not counting the bathroom. Ever been up here?"

  "No, actually. He didn't really like us going upstairs, even if the restroom downstairs was busy."

  "Sounds like there was something he didn't want you to see."

  "Like a bottle of fucking chloroform?"

  I nodded.

  There was a room directly across from us, and another to the right. We started with the one on the right, which turned out to be a study.

  The study had an expensive looking dark wood desk, and bookshelves lining the walls that seemed to be made of the same type of dark wood as the desk. The shelves were filled end to end with books, but also folders; plastic, and manila.

  My Geiger counter ticked much higher in the study than in the bedroom.

  Must've spent more time working than sleeping. Go figure.

  On the desk, there were drafting tools, and sketches. Sketches-- which, as I got closer, looked more like schematics. They had a vague similarity to the above ground sewer looking thing I'd seen Peabody take apart in the footage. The thing Beatrice had called the "calibrator".

  "Hey Beatrice, take a look a look at this."

  Beatrice stopped her perusal of the shelves, walking over to me with one of the manila folders in hand.

  "Huh," she breathed out.

  "What is it?"

  "It's the calibrator, but reconfigured. I recognize all the individual components, they're just put together differently here."

  "Is it just a different shape in the drawing? Or is it meant to do something different that way?"

  "I can't really say just looking at a drawing of it, but look here," she pointed at a section that had thick bundles of wires sprouting from it. "These are new. The part that's supposed to be here is a proprietary mechanism designed to feed the quantum computer the stabilized particles so it can think. It's been swapped out for regular old ethernet cables.

  "So... the calibrator isn't giving brain cells anymore... it's... taking orders?"

  "If it helps you understand it, sure, basically."

  "What does that mean? What's he doing with the reconfigured calibrator then?"

  Beatrice shrugged.

  "Maybe I can try and work the purpose if he has more notes lying around."

  "It's weird he just has his work out like this."

  "He probably can't trust a computer to do it."

  "Why? You think he's worried about someone phishing his computer for it?"

  "That too, but it's probably more to do with the radiation he gives off. It could mess with computer memory, corrupt his files. It's probably why he never got close to the quantum computer or calibrator while we were working on it."

  "Huh," I breathed.

  Beatrice's attention remained on the schematics, and, seeing that it came from a manila folder, searched the other manila folders for more of the same. I watched her for a minute, seeing her scrunch up her face as she gathered more and more schematics, getting deeper and deeper into her own little world.

  While Beatrice looked over the schematics, I decided to keep digging around the study. My eye fell on a plastic folder so I grabbed it, opening it somewhere in the middle.

  There were pictures inside. Children's pictures.

  "What the fuck," I mouthed.

  They were head shots, seemingly pulled out of an elementary school's yearbook, complete with names in alphabetical order.

  A few of the photos had X's over them, though some were circled.

  As I flipped through the folder, a chill ran down my spine. I knew these children. They'd been my classmates.

  I flipped back toward the front, where my own photo would have been, and nearly dropped the folder when I saw my sixth grade photo circled.