by Rob Hart
“Es tu primer día?” he asked.
“Sí,” Zinnia said.
He smiled, his eyes going soft, like a parent who’d gotten disappointing news about a child. He nodded his head slowly and said, “Buena suerte.”
She didn’t like the way he said it. He turned his back and Zinnia dug into the tacos. Not the best she’d had, but good enough for Middle of Fucking Nowheresville. When she was done with her food she slid the plate across the bar and waved to the cook, who waved back and gave another pained smile. Then she wandered down the corridor until it opened into a large hall.
Live-Play smelled like fresh running water. Air filters working overtime. It reminded her a little bit of a shopping mall, or at least, how shopping malls were back before they fell out of vogue. When she was a child, and it felt as if everything she could ever want was there in one place. There were three levels, one above her and one below, accessible by a jumble of elevators and escalators. Shops and stores hugging the walls, walkways looking out over a chasm. A large portion of it was taken up by a casino. At the roof, a series of glass panels let in a filtered view of the sky, muted dark blue.
There was a British pub and a sushi joint—sushi, sure, fresh fish all the way out here. And a CloudBurger, which was supposed to be quite good, and included an actual piece of beef that didn’t cost as much as an entire dinner.
Besides food, there was a retro arcade and a more advanced VR room. Plus a movie theater, nail salon, massage parlor, candy store. The seating areas along the floor were dotted with people. More people milled in and out of the stores.
She passed a deli and felt a little pang in her stomach. She could eat more. A piece of fruit would be nice. Something fresh. She stepped inside and wandered the short aisles, found packages of processed food, drinks in the fridge case. But no apples, no bananas. She left. Kept walking until she crossed the retro arcade. She abandoned her quest for fruit, stepped into the maze of glittering and buzzing machines.
All the games had little metal discs on the front. She searched the place for a coin machine but couldn’t find one, so she ducked back into the hallway, found a CloudPoint kiosk. They were everywhere. She could see half a dozen more from where she was standing.
She logged into the banking portal, which prompted her to swipe her watch. The screen lit up—Welcome, Zinnia!—and she got to work linking the dummy bank account on the outside, putting credits into her account. She transferred $1,000 and ended up with $994.45. As she worked she examined the kiosk—like an ATM, big and heavy and plastic, with a touchscreen. No visible access ports.
There was a panel toward the bottom of the machine, probably with at least a USB connection, probably some other tech she could play with, but a few problems presented themselves: how to open the panel, how to keep the near-field communication tech from registering her watch, how to do it so no one would see. Still, probably a good option to get the entrée she needed.
She scrolled around the screen and found that the current rate for pickers was nine credits per hour, which probably translated to somewhere between eight and nine bucks. Once that was finished, her watch now loaded with some money, she went back to the arcade, spent a little more time wandering the empty aisles until she found what she was looking for.
Pac-Man. The classic version. First released in Japan in 1980. The Japanese name was Pakkuman. Paku-paku described the sound of a mouth opening and closing in rapid succession. Zinnia liked video games, and this was her favorite.
She swiped her CloudBand and started, pushing the little yellow form through the maze, gobbling white dots while avoiding candy-colored ghosts, jerking the joystick to the left and the right, the sound of it slamming against the cabinet loud, as if she might break it.
The machine, and everything else around her, supposedly powered by the sun and the wind.
Supposedly.
The technical term for what she did was “competitive intelligence.” The romantic term was “corporate espionage.” She infiltrated the tightest security systems, the most secretive companies, to abscond with their best-kept secrets.
And she was good at it.
But she’d never worked Cloud before. Never even thought of it. That was like climbing Everest. Though with the way things were going, it was only a matter of time. Cloud hoovered up businesses so fast, soon there wouldn’t be anyone left who needed to spy on someone else. It used to be she could work a job every few months and that was more than enough. Lately she was lucky to pull a gig a year.
Still, when she’d accepted this, she’d figured there wasn’t much to it. Probably a miscalculation on someone’s part. But then she examined the satellite photos. The square acreage of the solar farms. The specs of the photovoltaic panels. The number and output of the wind turbines. And she realized her employers were right: there didn’t seem to be any way Cloud could produce the amount of energy required to run this place.
One of the reasons Cloud enjoyed tax-free status was the company’s green initiatives. The company had to meet government-mandated energy benchmarks in order to qualify for huge tax breaks. So if it was true—if the infrastructure on site wasn’t enough to produce the energy needed to sustain it—Cloud was using something else. Probably something that wasn’t green. Which meant they could stand to lose millions—maybe billions.
The orange ghost got on her tail. Zinnia moved Pac-Man up and down the alleys on the screen, mostly ones she had already cleared, trying to shake him, trying to avoid the others, until she reached the larger glowing orb that flipped the table. The ghosts went blue and she gave chase.
So, who benefits?
Not that she needed to know in order to do her job. But the question was like an itch. It could have been one of the journalism or good-government groups that were always up Cloud’s ass about labor practices or the monopoly it held on online retail. Newspapers had been trying to sneak people into these facilities for years, but the algorithms and work histories had always weeded them out. It had taken Zinnia a month to build a fake history with a solid-enough foundation to pass muster.
But she figured it was more likely one of the brick-and-mortar superstore companies, wanting to take Cloud down a few pegs. Regain some of the foothold they’d lost after the Black Friday Massacres.
Zinnia found herself with most of the screen cleared, just a few dots up in the left-hand corner still to munch. She made for them.
All that mattered was this: A facility of this size with this many people ought to have required fifty megawatts per hour to operate. And the capacity of the solar and wind fields was fifteen, maybe twenty. Something was off. She just had to figure out what. Which meant making it inside their infrastructure. She had a few months to do it and until then she was on her own. No communication with her employers. Not even through the encrypted app on her phone. She had no idea how capable Cloud was.
Zinnia jerked Pac-Man down another alley, going for those last dots, the ghosts flanking her. She aimed for the next hard left but knew she wouldn’t make it in time. Within seconds she was trapped, and the orange ghost ran into Pac-Man and the little yellow orb made a whistle-and-splat sound as it deflated and disappeared.
GIBSON
There are a lot of days at Cloud I remember, but the one I remember most fondly is the first day. I remember it because it was the hardest. Every day after that was a little easier.
People thought I was nuts to start this company. A lot of people probably don’t even remember, back in the day, there was another company that did some of the same stuff we do now, except on a much smaller scale. Problem was, their interests were too earthbound.
Ever since I was a kid, I was obsessed with the sky. The broadness of it. Like we had this giant resource over us every day and we weren’t really using it. Sure, we had planes flying this way and that, but there seemed to be so much more potential.
>
At a pretty young age I knew the future was in drone technology. The air and the roads had been all gummed up by these giant trucks, taking up space, spitting out poison. If we could solve the truck problem, we could solve a lot of other problems. Traffic, pollution, crash fatalities.
Do you know what traffic costs? About ten years ago, when it reached epidemic proportions, you’re talking about something like $305 billion in direct and indirect losses in a single year. This was according to the Institute for Economics and Business Research.
Now, what does that mean? Losses include time wasted while sitting in traffic, the cost of fuel, impact on the environment, road maintenance, traffic fatalities. Mass transit helps, but only so much. Even way back when I was young, a lot of our mass transit infrastructure was already falling apart, and the cost to fix it was astronomical. We all remember when the New York City subway system finally fell apart. That city has never been the same since.
The key was getting drones into the sky for more than just fun and games.
I remember my first drone. This dinky little thing that couldn’t go more than a hundred feet without dipping down and crashing. It certainly wasn’t strong enough to carry much. But as time went on, as the mechanics got better and they could carry more weight, I began to tinker with them, and then invested in a company that made them—lucky for me, right before the company took off, so I ended up with a nice little chunk of cash.
That company was called WhirlyBird. I hated that name, but they did something real smart. Rather than take drones as they were, they thought, If we were to design these today, knowing what we know now, how could we make them better?
They started from scratch. Redistributed the way the motors were laid out. Experimented with new kinds of materials. Lighter composites. World-changing technology, the New York Times called it. And I was damn proud to be a part of it.
From there, it took a lot of lobbying with the Federal Aviation Administration to figure out how to keep planes and drones in the air at the same time, without anyone crashing into each other. Drones don’t go that high, but you don’t want to screw with takeoff and landing.
And to be honest, that was damn hard. Not so much the crashing—the guys and gals at WhirlyBird developed some pretty good detection technology. The problem was, well, you know we started with ground delivery, but when we wanted to move Cloud over to majority-drone delivery, we had to work with the federal government. And it was pretty much a nightmare. Years and years of problems. Until finally, we made an agreement to take control of the FAA. We privatized it, we staffed it with competent people—and it got better.
You can build one government-funded building in the time it takes to develop a hundred privately owned properties, because of one key difference—private developers want to make money, while governments want to keep people employed. Which means dragging things out as long as possible.
Anyway, a lot of people think I named my company Cloud because of the way the drones look coming off the processing centers, these great big clouds of machines flying packages this way and that. But I went with Cloud because that was my mission statement.
The sky wasn’t the limit anymore.
So, back to that first day, it was me and Ray Carson—yes, Ray, there from day one. Besides having a strong back, Ray was real tech-savvy, more so than me, so he was a big help, able to translate whenever someone started throwing out words with more than three syllables. So I named him my VP. It was him and me and a couple of other folks. First thing we had to do was sign up a bunch of companies, get them to agree to let us deliver their goods. If we got some good companies and did a good job for them, I knew more would follow.
We rented this office building in the downtown area, not too far from where I grew up, which was important to me, because I wanted that connection to my hometown. I didn’t want to forget where I came from.
So we show up to the office, and the place is empty. I swear to truth, all these years later, I know for a fact the Realtor told us the office would be furnished. It wasn’t a big space—or even a very nice space—but it was a space, and we wouldn’t have to scramble to fill it. But we walk in and the place is stripped bare. Nothing but walls and floors and wires hanging from where the lighting fixtures used to be. The previous company, this old accounting firm, they were supposed to leave their stuff behind.
They even took the damn toilets!
So I get on the phone with the Realtor, a real crook whose name I wish I could remember, because I would just love to plaster it all over the internet right now. He swore to me up and down that no, he never said the place would be furnished. And this was back in my youth, when I was a little more energetic but, I guess you could say, easily distracted. I didn’t get any kind of promise in writing, just a handshake deal.
Which apparently, to this guy, wasn’t worth anything.
So it’s me and Ray and about a dozen people standing around with not much to do but stare at all this empty space. This is where Renee stepped up big-time. Renee was a former military gal, as smart and tough as they come. If you were to tell her something wasn’t possible, she would give this cute little laugh and then tell you: “Make it possible.” I learned a lot from her.
She gets on the horn, calling up everyone in creation, trying to find us what we need. After all the money I’d laid out on the building and licensing and a bunch of other start-up costs, it just about wiped out my windfall from the WhirlyBird investment. I was really relying on her. And Renee finds out there’s this school nearby that’s being closed down, on account of it’s consolidating with another school in the district, and a lot of the furniture is getting piled up outside to get hauled off.
Jackpot! I’m not the kind of guy who needs fancy things. I don’t need some desk that changes heights and makes my coffee and tells me I look nice. All I need is a phone, a computer, a pad, a pen, and a place to sit. End of list.
Me and Ray and a few of the other men trek out to the school, and sure enough, there’s a big pile of stuff. We took everything. At that point I didn’t want to be picky. I didn’t know exactly how much of it we even needed. I figured, anything that we can take, let’s take it and see if we can use it.
There were a couple of teacher’s desks, metal behemoths that weighed a million pounds, but there weren’t enough of them to go around. We did find a lot of school desks. The kind with the top that would flip up and you could store stuff inside. We got dozens of those. And what we did was line them up in rows of three and bolt them together.
We got to calling them triplets. I took one for myself. It felt important that I didn’t take one of those big old desks. I didn’t want to give people the wrong idea about how things were, like I needed special treatment. If I’d had my way, everyone would have taken a triplet, but Ray just fell in love with a big desk we dragged over. He liked to put his feet up when he was thinking, so I figured, I’ll let him have it.
I still have my triplet, down in the basement of my house. And that’s why, when you go to our corporate offices, you’ll see that everyone works on one. No $10,000 mahogany slabs carved from a single tree for us. Over time I came to appreciate the look of them. I think it’s a good reminder. Stay humble. No one needs a big fancy desk except for someone who wants you to think he’s more important than he really is.
We found a lot of discarded computer equipment, too. We had this kid working for us, Kirk, a real whiz. He basically took all this stuff and built a big Frankenstein of a computer network, just so we could get on our feet.
I think that’s what needed to happen. It was our first real test.
Technically, the first test was my having this idea, and convincing enough people I had enough wits that maybe I could pull it off. But this was our first physical test. One of those moments when a lot of folks would throw their hands up and say they were done. My team dug in and found a solution to a pro
blem.
I remember, after we finished up, it was well past sundown, and me and Ray wandered over to this local bar we went to sometimes, the Foundry. Both of us were aching, dragging ourselves onto bar stools like old men, and we figured, we ought to toast. Get a nice glass of scotch or something. So I went into my wallet and found it was empty—I had bought everyone lunch that day. And my cards were maxed out.
Ray, God bless him, put his card down on the bar and ordered us two scotches on the rocks. But his cards were close to maxed out, too, so he got well scotch, which tasted like battery acid that had been lit on fire.
To this day, the best drink I ever had.
Before we called it an early night—believe me, we weren’t the type to tie one on, especially when we had to be in to work early the next day—Ray patted me on the back and said, “I think this is the start of something.”
This is a hard thing to say, especially with how much faith everyone put in me at that point, but I didn’t believe him. Sitting in that bar, thinking of my school desk and our computer network that seemed to switch off if the wind blew too hard—I was so scared. Like I’d convinced these people I wasn’t nuts, and now they were depending on me.
Ray gave me a second wind. There from the beginning. I don’t have any brothers or sisters, but I have Ray, and that’s the next best thing.
ZINNIA
Zinnia pulled on a pair of jeans and her red polo, then sat down to put on some shoes, and found herself with two not-so-great choices.
She’d brought a sturdy pair of boots, because she thought she’d be on the tech team, and a pair of flats so thin they were practically socks. She liked them because she could ball them up and stick them into her purse, but for a job like this, lots of standing and walking, they weren’t going to cut it. Plus, her ankle still felt a little wonky from that spill in Bahrain last month. She needed the support, so she opted for the boots.