Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  Laura pictured the pale tribe being forced one day to emerge from their habitat — shielding their eyes and suffering almost instant and near fatal sunburn.

  "What do you think?" Gray asked, pausing at the far side of the room.

  "They're all nerds," Laura whispered.

  She watched Gray smile, then grin, then burst out laughing — startling some of the mole people nearby. He beamed at her — his eyes sparkling brightly. He was a handsome man. "I actually meant the facility," he said, still greatly amused.

  Laura looked around, searching for something to say. "It's very… neat."

  "Thank you," he replied on the verge of a chuckle. "And you're right, they are nerds. It's a sad but true fact. But their average net worth I'd guess is over ten million dollars." Laura shot him a look of astonishment, and he shrugged. "I give them this thing called a revenue slice. It's a lot of money, but with productivity comes [missing]. If one person can make a thousand times as many widgets as another you can pay him a thousand times as much. Or" — Gray caught Laura's gaze—"at least a hundred."

  He was grinning broadly again. He'd told another joke.

  Gray turned and led Laura down a hallway. They passed a series of featureless doors — no paneling, no hardware, just flat white plastic.

  One of those doors up ahead slid open on their approach, riding a faintly audible puff of air into the wall.

  It had opened a half-second before they arrived, Laura noted, but an identical door across the hall had remained closed. She entered the room behind the oblivious Gray, still wondering how the door had known when to open.

  They walked straight into the middle of heated debate. Seated around a long table in the high-tech conference room were six more nerds — male and female — and one distinctly non-nerd. The one exception was a brawny, tanned man who had the square-jawed look of a soldier. He seemed totally out of place amid that group, and remained silent while the nerds engaged in an animated free-for-all.

  His keen eyes locked onto Laura as she took the seat next to Gray.

  When Gray leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table, everyone fell silent as if on cue. "First off," Gray said in the suddenly calm conference room, "I'd like to introduce to you the newest member of our team, Dr. Laura Aldridge." There were a couple of weak nods, but no chorus of welcome.

  Laura was instantly on guard. Gray turned to the woman on his left.

  "Dr. Aldridge, this is Dr. Margaret Bickham. She's our director of artificial intelligence — that's 'software.'" The severe woman nodded — her lips pinched so tightly they were puckered and wrinkled, her mouth cutting across her face in a perfectly straight line that was neither a smile nor a frown. "To her left," Gray said, lying his palm out toward the pointed end of the oval table, "is Dr. Georgi Filatov, our head of computer operations."

  "So pleased to meet you, I'm sure," the man said with a thick Russian accent. He looked like some legendary chess champion or a mentalist who bent spoons with brainpower. His bushy, graying hair served to double the apparent size of his head.

  "Georgi keeps the main computer's hardware operational. Next is Dr. Philip Griffith," Gray said, nodding to the man seated across the table. "Dr. Griffith is director of robotics. I guess that's self-explanatory." The man waggled his [garbled] to wave clumsily at Laura, his eyes smiling behind thick glasses and his grin spreading wide his mutton chop sideburns, revealing a perfectly unmatched set of crooked teeth.

  Laura's eyes moved on to the next man — to the hard stare from across the table that hadn't left her since she entered the room.

  "And this is Franz Hoblenz. He's my security chief." The man nodded curtly at Laura. He was large, had the weathered look of an outdoorsman, and regarded her so openly that his manner was fairly suggestive of a baseness — that particularly male baseness — from which Laura instinctively recoiled.

  "Next up is Dr. Dorothy Holliday. She's our 'epidemiologist.'"

  Everyone laughed, but the joke was completely lost on Laura.

  "I'm actually in charge of 'E and V,'" the blushing woman said, her voice surprisingly high in pitch. "Errors and viruses," she translated.

  Laura's gaze lingered on the relatively talkative girl. She was young — early twenties, at most — and pretty. She had an engaging but self-conscious smile, without the grace and ease that maturity would bring. She was Laura — only a decade or more younger.

  "We just call her 'Doc' Holliday," the soldier from across the table growled. The joking reference to the ancient gunfighter drew titters from the group. The muscular man's comment had surprised Laura, not because of his deep and gravelly voice — which was appropriate to his appearance — but because of his thick Texas accent.

  She had expected the blond security chief to be German.

  Gray completed his introductions with the heads of production and space operations, who looked to Laura like more clones from Gray's mad scientist factory.

  "Okay," Gray said, changing tones and holding his hands out in query, "what's the latest error report?"

  Dorothy Holliday poked a pen at her palmtop computer. "We had a pneumatic door close right in the face of a guy at the gym two hours ago."

  "Was it verified?" Margaret Bickham asked from the opposite end of the table.

  "Yep," Dorothy replied, bobbing her head somewhat awkwardly in affirmation. "The guy had just finished, like, having a humongous fight with his wife in front of God and everybody. When he stomped off, he walked" — she clapped her upright palms together in demonstration—"right into the door. Must've been twenty people standing around who saw it. Word I got was they had a good laugh," she said, ready to laugh herself but getting no takers from her somber audience. "Anyway, the door operated normally after that. Phase one's scan was negative."

  When nobody commented, Dorothy arched her eyebrows and compressed her lips into a frown, then moved on. Laura smiled at the girl's unaffectedly juvenile manner — her every feeling displayed naturally on a face not yet adept at the art of deception.

  Dorothy's palmtop made quiet bings with every press of her pen. "Then," she continued, her voice little more than a squeak that you had to strain hard to hear, "about an hour ago, we had a customer in Copenhagen — one of our former checkers, as a matter of fact — who complained that her account balance was, like, way off. We looked into it, and the account showed a several hundred thousand dollar balance."

  "Jesus," Georgi Filatov said, shaking his head in disgust. The bushy mop of his hair swayed with the motion, and he leaned forward to exchange glances with the others.

  "When finally…" Dorothy began.

  "Another error?" Margaret asked, seemingly incredulous.

  Dorothy frowned again and nodded. "A vapor lamp in the parking lot of our Taiwan facility burned out. One of the security guards reported it, but the outage obviously should've triggered an operator notice."

  "I'm gonna send a team to Taipei to check it out," Hoblenz said to Gray. "That's the second fault at the same facility. Security integrity could've been compromised."

  Gray nodded. "Okay. What are we doing about the problem? Margaret?" he asked, starting on his left with the director of artificial intelligence. She lifted a metal briefcase from the floor, which she methodically placed on the table and opened with popping sounds from its latches. As she leafed through her papers, Laura studied the woman. She was a goodly number of pounds overweight, and she wore glasses, as did everyone there other than Laura, Gray, and Hoblenz. And Dorothy, Laura amended as she looked around.

  Sitting at opposite ends of the table, Dorothy and Margaret formed "bookends" of a sort. They were the only women at the table… until Laura's arrival.

  Laura glanced back and forth between the two women.

  Dorothy's light brown hair was thin and straight and pinned back from her face with barrettes. Small wisps dangled here and there in an unintended but attractive way. Margaret's dark and graying thatch sprouted into what looked like an army helmet pressed tightly ar
ound her skull. Neither woman wore any makeup to speak of, although the fresh-scrubbed youth of Dorothy's skin obviated any real need for it.

  And both clearly paid no attention to clothes.

  Margaret wore maroon polyester slacks and a military-style white shirt complete with epaulets and piping and a buttoned-up breast pocket filled to the bursting point with some hidden cargo. Dorothy wore faded, baggy blue jeans and a tight-fitting sleeveless blouse over a frame that was all skin and bones.

  Laura sat between the two, wondering idly which she resembled more. It was then she felt, more than saw, that Gray was watching her.

  Suddenly alert, Laura grew more and more conscious of Gray's presence next to her — of his unwavering and unnerving scrutiny. She made certain she didn't catch Gray's eye — looking anywhere but in his direction — and in so doing her gaze ran headlong into the unblinking stare of Hoblenz. The man didn't bother to avert his eyes, brazenly checking her out and not at all disturbed at being caught. It was instead Laura who felt compelled to turn away.

  "Jesus Chest, Margaret!" Filatov burst out. "We don't have all night!"

  Margaret ignored the barb. In fact, she slowed her search through the briefcase to a crawl, checking each nook and cranny in utter disregard of her colleague's histrionics. Filatov snorted like a bull, scanning the table for support.

  Finally, Margaret cleared her throat and adjusted her glasses. She placed a single sheet of paper on the table, wove her fingers together, and nested her chin in the mesh. "We asked the computer to run a pattern-recognition routine on the errors to date."

  "What did it turn up?" Gray asked.

  "Nothing."

  There was a moment of silence, then Filatov exploded. "Goddamn!" He slammed his hand on the table with a resounding boom, causing Laura to flinch.

  Margaret couldn't have cared less. "The errors appear to be random," she continued as if she were in a different universe from Filatov. "It has instituted a constant monitoring, though, and will report any matches it finds."

  "She's a Vulcan!" Filatov shouted, his hands gesturing wildly. "Not a Vulcan — a Klingon!"

  "Georgi-i-i," Griffith said, shaking his head to chastise Filatov for the vile aspersion.

  "What threshold did it establish for a match?" Gray asked sitting unperturbed through the shocking display of disunity.

  "I don't know," Margaret replied.

  "Check it," Gray ordered curtly. "I want you to set it very low. I'd rather chase a few wild geese than miss the chance for an early detection." He looked now at Filatov — his head of operations. "What about you, Georgi?" Gray asked in a buoyant tone, pressing the corners of his lips flat to deny a smile. An attentive Hoblenz leaned forward, grinning ear to ear in anticipation.

  "Before I report," Filatov began in a deliberate and overly loud voice, "I think maybe we should all give Margaret a round of applause for the fine work she's been doing to resolve our present difficulties."

  Filatov clapped his hands slowly several times — no one else joining in.

  Still, Gray said nothing.

  When Filatov was through, he sighed deeply then resumed as if nothing had happened. "We're running at about ninety-six percent system capacity. That net, of course, of the phase one antiviral program. I've been discussing with Dorothy the… the possibility of clearing up enough resources for phase two."

  Laura still marveled at the unchallenged rudeness of the man and missed at first the fact that all eyes had gravitated toward Gray.

  She had no idea what the significance of Filatov's comment was, but a tension had filled the room on his use of the words "phase two."

  The proposal, whatever it was, seemed momentous.

  Gray made a slow sweep of the faces ending with Dorothy. The girl was doodling on her palmtop absentmindedly and didn't bother to look up before speaking. "We'd need to free up a total of about" — she cringed, bunching her shoulders as if to ward off impending doom—"six percent?" She winced.

  There was instant commotion from around the table, everyone voicing their outrage at Dorothy's suggestion.

  "One conversation at a time!" Gray said sternly, and the room fell quiet again. He turned back to Dorothy.

  The girl went on, her body having sunk further into the chair and her voice to barely a whisper. "Georgi said figure at least one, preferably two percent…"

  "Speak up!" Hoblenz interrupted — speaking in a stentorian tone as if to set an example.

  Dorothy sat bolt upright. "Yes, sir!" she replied assertively but in her childlike voice. She sarcastically saluted Hoblenz in an inexpert manner. "We need two-o-o percent more," she said loudly, lowering her soprano's voice in imitation of Hoblenz's bass and staring at him through two fingers wiggling in air.

  "Without headroom for spikes," Filatov jumped in, "we'd run dangerously close to a hundred percent of capacity. If we had a surge of throughput…" He faltered and fell silent. Everyone there knew what results would ensue if Filatov's fears materialized. Everyone but Laura. "That means we'd need a total of eight percent free," Filatov continued sheepishly. "Right now, I can find four with a little juggling of the night's runs." His eyes panned the table, his hands spreading wide in a gesture of apology or of supplication. "We'd have to come up with another four percent from somewhere."

  A pathetic attempt at a whistle came from Philip Griffith, Gray's director of robotics.

  "How much do we gain if we drop overnight error checking on interbank transfers?" Gray asked. Several people's heads shot up.

  "I'll indemnify the banks for any discrepancies," he said, allaying a concern Laura could only guess at from context. She felt like a spectator at a game whose rules she hadn't learned. Her appreciation of what transpired hinged upon reading the reactions of the others.

  Filatov rocked back in his chair and cupped his hands behind his head. His eyes drifted up toward the ceiling. There were rings of sweat on his shirt beneath his arms. "That would give us four percent or so, I suppose. But if you figure ten P.M. on the West Coast is about seven A.M. on the Continent, that only gives us a couple of hours before the banks open in Europe and we start wire-clearing operations."

  "What about trying to load phase two a little earlier in the evening?" Gray asked.

  "You can check with programming," Filatov said, "but tonight's that big pay-per-view heavyweight championship fight in Las Vegas. Last I heard, the marketing people were expecting close to fifty million orders."

  "And that's an eight-channel broadcast," Hoblenz spoke up unexpectedly. "One channel in each fighter's corner, one with and one without announcers, plus the helmet-cams and I don't know what else. And all that with full VR simulcast for the beta testers."

  "Is two hours enough to finish a phase-two sweep of the system?" Gray asked Dorothy.

  She shrugged, then began to waggle her head from side to side in motions that slowly became a rhythmic nodding in time with music only Dorothy could hear. "O-o-o-h," she said, and then sighed. "We haven't run a phase-two scan since last year. And we've doubled system size since then. That run time was seventy-four minutes."

  Gray frowned. "Let's start off-loading, then. I want everybody to give me proposals for ten percent reductions in their department's budgeted usage." There were groans from all sides, and Hoblenz cleared his throat and sat forward. "Everybody but security," Gray amended, and Hoblenz nodded. "We'll meet again in four hours."

  Laura looked at her watch. That'll be at 1:00 A.M., she thought, but decided she didn't feel tired. She was excited. She didn't know what was happening or what was expected of her, but this was definitely exciting. It was so unlike everything to which she'd grown accustomed, and she accepted the fact that in the business world you had to work long hours. That's why he pays so well, she concluded, feeling somewhat less abashed at accepting the money.

  "Meanwhile, Dr. Aldridge," Gray said, jarring Laura from her cocoon of anonymity, "I'll let you get familiarized a bit before you settle in and get started. Dr. Griffith, why don't y
ou give Dr. Aldridge a tour of the facilities?" Gray said to his head of robotics.

  The man looked astonished. He stared back at Gray, his red lips parted at the intersection of his enormous sideburns. His eyes — magnified behind Coke-bottle lenses — appeared ready to pop out of his head. "But, Mr. Gray, I've scheduled a… a systems check for tonight on the auxiliary belts, and a quality control review in the…"

  "Get someone to cover for you," Gray replied, cutting him short and rising to leave. "I'll see you all in four hours. Meeting adjourned."

  11

  "I'm sorry if I'm keeping you from your job," Laura said as the elevator continued its high-speed descent. "I mean, you sound pretty busy. I don't know why Mr. Gray would pick you to show me around."

  Griffith shrugged. "Mr. Gray is a way strange dude." After smiling her way, Griffith raised his upper lip to expose his teeth in what looked like a snarl. He grimaced a total of three times — wrinkling his face and squinting with each exaggerated expression before finally relenting and using his fingers to press his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose.

  Laura turned away and maintained a neutral expression. She'd seen Griffith's type many times before, especially in academia. Oddballs.

  Clueless loners. The kind of people who populated the lines at the department of motor vehicles and loved to talk about government conspiracies. The only difference between that sort and academics like Griffith was their IQ scores.

  Griffith snorted loudly and made a grunting sound as he cleared his throat. When Laura's ears popped for the third time, she asked, "How far down are we going?"

  "The main pool is about three hundred meters below sea level," he replied. "We found at that depth the lava stone absorbs most of the subatomic junk flying around through space and reduces our error rate substantially. It also, of course, eliminates electromagnetic interference and more mundane problems like vibrations and dust." The elevator began to slow. "Then, of course, there's the physical security." Griffith opened a box set into the wall of the elevator and handed Laura a pair of dark sunglasses.