Chapter 7.

Old friends.

When Barry arrived he hugged him and said, "Do you want a whiskey or a brandy?" Foster replied, "I want a little bit of both, so mix them both because I want something strong today."

Laughing, Barry said, "This reminds me of when we were 18 and we were entering the academy. Remember when you used to sneak out of the barracks to chase after the ladies?"

Foster said, laughing, "Youth is a divine treasure and I'm not going to deny that I was a complete flirt back then. It's a shame to see how time is passing us by and we can't do anything but wait for the final verdict."

Both men continued talking and drinking for a while. The atmosphere was very friendly. It was obvious that they hadn't seen each other for at least 4 years...

They were catching up on some things... Barry had told him that he was already going through his fourth divorce, but that he still felt young and had fallen in love with a married woman.

While Foster just listened to his friend and said: I wish I had the same guts as you to get married, get divorced, fall out of love and fall in love with the same people throughout my life…

Maybe then life would be a little easier; look at you: you have been the lover, the husband, the boyfriend of all your exes and I can barely bring flowers to my daughter, hoping that one day she will come back to me from the dead or wherever she is supposed to be.

Barry told him: if you weren't so hard-headed, you would understand a little more that you can love more than two people at the same time, with the same intensity with which you loved your first love…

And laughing his head off, Foster said: stop with the cheesy stuff, I don't think I'm not going to come back to you unless you put the banderillas on me... those old men were dying of laughter telling each other the anecdotes of their lives... and then, when night was already falling and the drinks were taking a bit of effect, Barry changed his expression and said: I know you're waiting to hear this, and I have to tell you that Caesar Bardot has been coming in and out of the country very often in the last five years, but about two years ago he bought a luxury apartment in the city, in fact, he's there right now.

Getting a date with him is harder than fornicating with a young girl... I know you haven't asked me, but I also found out that he's one of the heirs of the Bardot family.

He has an artificial intelligence and biomechanics business that focuses on creating cybers or avatars as real as possible; In fact, many of the security guards at the largest branches of the family empire were replaced by fully equipped avatars, and they are so real that they could be mistaken for just another man in this city.

He is a complete nerd, he has no known girlfriend, fiancée, lover… Nothing!!! To be honest, I think he gets pissed off, and among his most well-known social circle are obviously his family, his sisters, his sisters' husbands, a couple of doctors from here and a historian from a country whose name I can't even remember, so I think that if you are looking for something more with him, I think you will need to make an appointment with his assistant, invite him to have coffee, have wild sex with him and maybe give him a couple of children, but I doubt that with those asses that you have that already look like they were sucked by whoever brought them, I highly doubt that the man would want to lay a finger on you… although of course, someone like me might be able to agree to go have coffee with you tomorrow, he said laughing.

Then Foster said to him: Oh, you faggot, you and your things, ha, ha, ha, but I find what you told me about the man interesting, and joking aside, I find it quite intriguing, I think we should be careful of silent people like him.

Hours later, Foster was still rolling around in his bed remembering every detail of the conversation, so Caesar Bardot keeps his life so private that even his company belongs to the private sector.

He had been investigating him shortly after he got home, which made Patrick's wife's attitude a little more real, because if he could prove that this woman was not a woman, but an avatar, everything would make more sense, so he took off his shirt, got out of bed, looked out the window... It must have been at least 3 in the morning; He went to his study and wrote on a sheet of paper: Ariadne Naxos, avatar or human?, and he put that under his photo on the bulletin board. Shortly after, he went back to sleep and in his dreams his wife seemed to tell him that they were wild and different animals; that the place smelled like rotten meat, but when he tried to tell her to tell him more, his body began to fill with bruises, welts and bites began to appear all over his skin, until he lost the color in his face as if all the blood had been extracted and he could only say: it was him, he left me like this… and before she could tell him where she was, the alarm on his phone would ring and bring him back to reality, he couldn't believe it was such a lucid dream, which was why he had recorded it before getting up with every detail with which he remembered her, he had mentioned it perhaps so as not to forget her and live in her memory, although he also felt deep inside that it was the memory of her and her unborn child that were trying to manifest themselves so that he would do them justice in some way.

With all that on his mind, as he splashed water on his face, he looked up while leaning on the sink and looking at the mirror he said in an almost creepy tone: I'm going to discover each of your movements you damn scum and when I do it I myself will send you to hell, I promise this for life that I will fulfill no matter what; this time I'm not going to care who else has to fall after you, but you're going to pay for it and every tear she has shed you will pay with every drop of your blood and that's a promise you damn crazy bastard...

For his part, Patrick was spending time with his sister at the Ritchthofen residence; The children were by his side every day growing a little more, perhaps much more than any infant their age could do, that is why Ritchthofen had been doing some tests and trials to slow down the process of human-animal growth, and so far it seemed to have worked almost completely, the children responded very well to the treatment and the side effects were very few and keeping that in mind, Patrick was a little more relieved, he did not want to have to deal again with the media or with some deranged madman who I would like to put it like that lunatic had tried to do… I still remembered her: Olive Rodriguez, that girl had been a pain in the ass and if it weren't for some advice he had heard from Natalie, the young woman would have died, perhaps the same day she tried to do that whole media circus.