Meryl looked at the comm screen in disbelief, and read it over for the third time.
"Hullo Sis!
Betcha didn't know you had a little bro! The nice man that handed me a paper told me to call you. He said you were the closest relative I had, and you'd take care of me. He even gave me your last name! Wasn't that nice of him?
Oh, I'm kinda lost in a big city, could you come get me?
--Murphy"
The fourth and fifth readings didn't make any more sense to her either.
She thought, "Well, let's start from the beginning." Turning to her desk terminal, she linked up with the company's comm net and began tracing the message. Since it was an unencrypted message, sent over an open channel, the trace only took 1.349 seconds. Which the terminal happily told her before displaying the trace.
"Silly AI" Meryl mumbled and began to read. The message originated from a public comm panel in the Rompa Bar. The sender was Murphy Stryfe, commonly known as 'Thunderslap.'
"This has to be a joke" she thought. A quick check of the R.U.R. employees list showed no comms activity at the time the message was sent. "So, whoever it is has really pulled out the stops for this one" she said to the terminal. For once, it didn't respond.
A Bureaucrat by trade, Meryl rapidly thought through a myriad of ways to ferret out more information from the vast array of R.U.R. and OT databases she had access to. Then stopped.
She announced to the terminal, "Hold my calls. If this is a joke, someone expects me to waste a day chasing false leads. I think I'll just play this one straight up. I'm going to Rompa's." Then she slipped a fresh clip into each pistol and had her NCU build a fresh droid shell.
"Better safe than sorry" she thought, "that gas leak in the women's toilet might have spread."