“No…”
“Good. We had a few people who were allergic to the stuff. But we’ve got to do this routine, for the clean rooms.”
I nodded. It was obviously a procedure to remove dust and other contaminants. The dousing fluid was highly volatile, evaporating at room temperature, drawing off microparticles on my body and clothes. The air jets and vacuum completed the scrub. The procedure would remove any loose particles on my body and suck them away.
“I’m Vince Reynolds,” the man said, but he didn’t hold out his hand. “You call me Vince. And you’re Jack?”
I said I was.
“Okay, Jack,” he said. “They’re waiting for you, so let’s get started. We got to take precautions, because this is an HMF, that’s high magnetic field environment, greater than 33 Tesla, so…” He picked up a cardboard box. “Better lose your watch.” I put the watch in the box.
“And the belt.”
I took my belt off, put it in the box.
“Any other jewelry? Bracelet? Necklace? Piercings? Decorative pins or medals? MedicAlert?”
“No.”
“How about metal inside your body? Old injury, bullets, shrapnel? No? Any pins for broken arms or legs, hip or knee replacement? No? Artificial valves, artificial cartilage, vascular pumps or implants?”
I said I didn’t have any of those things.
“Well, you’re still young,” he said. “Now how about in your bag?” He made me take everything out and spread it on a table, so he could rummage through it. I had plenty of metal in there: another belt with a metal buckle, nail clippers, a can of shaving cream, razor and blades, a pocket knife, blue jeans with metal rivets…
He took the knife and the belt but left the rest. “You can put your stuff back in the bag,” he said. “Now, here’s the deal. Your bag goes to the residence building, but no farther. Okay? There’s an alarm at the residence door if you try to take any metal past there. But do me a favor and don’t set it off, okay? ’Cause it shuts down the magnets as a safety procedure and it takes about two minutes to start ’em up again. Pisses the techs off, especially if they’re fabbing at the time. Ruins all their hard work.”
I said I would try to remember.
“The rest of your stuff stays right here.” He nodded to the wall behind me; I saw a dozen small safes, each with an electronic keypad. “You set the combination and lock it up yourself.” He turned aside so I could do that.
“I won’t need a watch?”
He shook his head. “We’ll get you a watch.”
“What about a belt?”
“We’ll get you a belt.”
“And my laptop?” I said.
“It goes in the safe,” he said. “Unless you want to scrub your hard drive with the magnetic field.” I put the laptop in with the rest of my stuff, and locked the door. I felt strangely stripped, like a man entering prison. “You don’t want my shoelaces, too?” I said, making a joke. “Nah. You keep those. So you can strangle yourself, if it turns out you need to.”
“Why would I need to?”
“I really couldn’t say.” Vince shrugged. “But these guys working here? Let me tell you, they’re all fucking crazy. They’re making these teeny-weeny little things you can’t see, pushing around molecules and shit, sticking ’em together. It’s real tense and detailed work, and it makes them crazy. Every fucking one of ’em. Nutty as loons. Come this way.” We passed through another set of glass doors. But this time, there was no spray.
…
We entered the power plant. Beneath blue halogen lamps, I saw huge metal tubs ten feet high, and fat ceramic insulators thick as a man’s leg. Everything hummed. I felt a distinct vibration in the floor. There were signs all around with jagged red lightning bolts saying warning: lethal electrical currents!
“You use a lot of power here,” I said.
“Enough for a small town,” Vince said. He pointed to one of the signs. “Take those warnings seriously. We had problems with fires, a while back.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Got a nest of rats in the building. Buggers kept getting fried. Literally. I hate the smell of burning rat fur, don’t you?”
“Never had that experience,” I said.
“Smells like what you’d think.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “How did the rats get in?”
“Up through the toilet bowl.” I must have looked surprised, because Vince said, “Oh, you don’t know that? Rats do that all the time, it’s just a short swim for them to get in. ’Course, if it happened while you were sitting, it’d be a nasty surprise.” He gave a short laugh. “Problem was the contractor for the building didn’t bury the leach field deep enough. Anyhow, rats got in. We’ve had a few accidents like that since I’ve been here.”
“Is that right? What kind of accidents?”
He shrugged. “They tried to make these buildings perfect,” he said. “Because they’re working with such small-size things. But it’s not a perfect world, Jack. Never has been. Never will be.” I said again, “What kind of accidents?”
By then we had come to the far door, with a keypad, and Vince punched in numbers quickly. The door clicked open. “All the doors are keyed the same. Oh six, oh four, oh two.” Vince pushed the door wide, and we stepped into a covered passageway connecting the power plant to the other buildings. It was stifling hot here, despite the roar of the air conditioner. “Contractor,” Vince explained. “Never balanced the air handlers right. We had ’em back five times to fix it, but this passage is always hot.”
At the end of the corridor was another door, and Vince had me punch in the code myself. The door clicked open.
I faced another airlock: a wall of thick glass, with another wall a few feet beyond. And behind that second wall, I saw Ricky Morse in jeans and a T-shirt, grinning and waving cheerfully to me.
His T-shirt said, “Obey Me, I Am Root.”
It was an inside joke. In the UNIX operating system, it meant the boss.
Over an intercom speaker, Ricky said, “I’ll take it from here, Vince.”
Vince waved. “No problem.”
“You fix that positive pressure setting?”
“Did it an hour ago. Why?”
“It may not be holding in the main lab.”
“I’ll check it again,” Vince said. “Maybe we got another leak somewhere.” He slapped me on the back, jerked his thumb toward the interior of the building. “Lots of luck in there.” Then he turned and walked back the way he came.
“It’s great to see you,” Ricky said. “You know the code to get in?” I said I did. He pointed to a keypad. I punched the numbers in. The glass wall slid sideways. I stepped into another narrow space about four feet wide, with metal grills on all four sides. The wall closed behind me.
A fierce blast of air shot up from the floor, puffing up my trouser legs, ruffling my clothing. Almost immediately it was followed by blasts of air coming from both sides, then from top, blowing down hard on my hair and shoulders. Then a whoosh of vacuum. The glass in front of me slid laterally. I smoothed down my hair and stepped out.
“Sorry about that.” Ricky shook my hand vigorously. “But at least we don’t have to wear bunny suits,” he said. I noticed that he looked strong, healthy. The muscles in his forearms were defined.
I said, “You look good, Ricky. Working out?”
“Oh, you know. Not really.”
“You’re pretty cut,” I said. I punched him on the shoulder.
He grinned. “Just tension on the job. Did Vince frighten you?”
“Not exactly…”
“He’s a little strange,” Ricky said. “Vince grew up alone out in the desert with his mother. She died when he was five. Body was pretty decomposed when they finally found her. Poor kid, he just didn’t know what to do. I guess I’d be strange, too.” Ricky gave a shrug. “But I’m glad you’re here, Jack. I was afraid you wouldn’t come.” Despite Ricky’s apparent good health, I was noticing now that he seemed nervous, edgy. He led me briskly down a short hallway. “So. How’s Julia?”
“Broke her arm, and hit her head pretty badly. She’s in the hospital for observation. But she’s going to be all right.”
“Good. That’s good.” He nodded quickly, continuing down a corridor. “Who’s taking care of the kids?”
I told him that my sister was in town.
“Then you can stay awhile? A few days?”
I said, “I guess. If you need me that long.” Ordinarily, software consultants don’t spend a lot of time on-site. One day, maybe two. Not more than that.
Ricky glanced over his shoulder at me. “Did Julia, ah, explain to you about this place?”
“Not really, no.”
“But you knew she was spending a lot of time here.”
I said, “Oh sure. Yes.”
“The last few weeks, she came out almost every day on the helicopter. Stayed over a couple of nights, too.”
I said, “I didn’t know she took such an interest in manufacturing.”
Ricky seemed to hesitate a moment. Then he said, “Well, Jack, this is a whole new thing…” He frowned. “She really didn’t tell you anything?”
“No. Not really. Why?”
He didn’t answer.
He opened the far door and waved me through. “This is our residential module, where everybody sleeps and eats.”
The air was cool after the passageway. The walls were the same smooth Formica material. I heard a low, continuous whoosh of air handlers. A series of doors opened off the hallway. One of them had my name on it, written in marker on a piece of tape. Ricky opened the door. “Home sweet home, Jack.”
The room was monastic-a small bed, a tiny desk just large enough to hold a workstation monitor and keyboard. Above the bed, a shelf for books and clothes. All the furniture had been coated with smooth-flowing white plastic laminate. There were no nooks or crannies to hold stray particles of dirt. There was no window in the room either, but a liquid-crystal screen showed a view of the desert outside.
There was a plastic watch and a belt with a plastic buckle on the bed. I put them on.
Ricky said, “Dump your gear, and I’ll give you the tour.”
Still keeping his brisk pace, he led me into a medium-size lounge with a couch and chairs around a coffee table, and a bulletin board on the wall. All the furniture here was the same flowing plastic laminate. “To the right is the kitchen and the rec room with TV, video games, so forth.” We entered the small kitchen. There were two people there, a man and a woman, eating sandwiches standing up. “I think you know these guys,” Ricky said, grinning. And I did. They had been on my team at MediaTronics.
Rosie Castro was dark, thin, exotic-looking, and sarcastic; she wore baggy cargo shorts and a T-shirt tight across her large breasts, which read YOU WISH. Independent and rebellious, Rosie had been a Shakespearean scholar at Harvard before she decided, in her words, that “Shakespeare is fucking dead. For fucking centuries. There is nothing new to say. What’s the point?” She transferred to MIT, became a protégée of Robert Kim, working on natural language programming. It turned out she was brilliant at it. And these days natural language programs were starting to involve distributed processing. Because it turned out people evaluate a sentence in several ways simultaneously, while it is being spoken; they don’t wait until it is finished but rather they form expectations of what is coming. That’s a perfect situation for distributed processing, which can work on a problem at several points simultaneously. I said, “Still wearing those T-shirts, Rosie.” At MediaTronics, we’d had some trouble about the way she dressed.
“Hey. Keeps the boys awake,” she said, shrugging.
“Actually, we ignore them.” I turned to David Brooks, stiff, formal, obsessively neat, and almost bald at twenty-eight. He blinked behind thick glasses. “They’re not that good, anyway,” he said. Rosie stuck her tongue out at him.
David was an engineer, and he had an engineer’s bluntness and lack of social skills. He was also full of contradictions; although he fussed over every detail of his work and appearance, on weekends he raced a dirt bike, often coming back covered in mud. He shook my hand enthusiastically. “I’m very glad you’re here, Jack.”
I said, “Somebody’s going to have to tell me why you’re all so glad to see me.” Rosie said, “Well, it’s because you know more about the multi-agent algorithms that-”
“I’m going to show him around first,” Ricky said, interrupting. “Then we’ll talk.”
“Why?” Rosie said. “You want it to be a surprise?”
“Hell of a surprise,” David said.
“No, not at all,” Ricky said, giving them a hard look. “I just want Jack to have some background first. I want to go over that with him.”
David looked at his watch. “Well, how much time do you think that will take? Because I figure we’ve got-”
“I said, Let me show him around, for Christ’s sake!” Ricky was almost snarling. I was surprised; I’d never seen him lose his temper before. But apparently they had:
“Okay, okay, Ricky.”