The Rise of the Speaker

by Pete Driscoll

  Tourists from all over the world came to see the public areas of the building, and queues of them could often be seen snaking their way onto the Mall outside. But even on days – like today – when the tower wasn’t open to the public the building was never short of activity; the hustle and bustle of a fully functioning government kept the tower feeling alive for most hours of the day.

  But from the balcony on the 94th floor, the tower - and the city surrounding it - seemed quiet, peaceful even. The Mall stretched a few miles South to the gigantic domed roof of the Senate, the real seat of power when it came to domestic matters in Atlantia and home to the People’s Congress; the Legislative branch of government. On either side of the Mall with its interspersed fountains, parks and walkways were a few dozen museums, public service and municipal buildings, the grandest of which was the centre of the judiciary – The Halls of Justice, the equivalent of the supreme court – Its huge marble-like edifice rose up to three spires, balanced on each of these were thirty foot high golden scales, the traditional symbol of a fair and unbiased legal system.

  Around the Mall, the city spread out in every direction. The thriving, beating heart of the world’s youngest nation. Behind the Senate, the Whitesnake River laced its way from the Mountains to the west, around the outskirts of the city and off to Port Defiance and its Naval base a few hundred miles to the South East. The peaks of the Western Mountains stood hazy along one horizon and between their base and the city stood the Hawking University, a melting pot of scientific and technological research intermingled with the teaching facilities of the Nation’s primary centre for higher learning.

  Beyond the city limits there were rolling green hills and the shadows of more distant mountains, small rural communities were linked by narrow roads that moved with the contours of the land. A few farmhouses could be made out, even from this distance; the different coloured fields or the tiny specks of livestock marking them out against the lush backdrop of central Atlantia. Most of the main transportation infrastructure was underground and with the exception of the city’s airport beyond the city limits towards the north east, the land was pristine. Looking out over the countryside had always filled me with a great sense of pride: beyond the glass railings of the balcony was the home of more than a quarter of a billion people.

  It was here that Penny found me the next morning, sipping my coffee and looking out over the city. The Whitesnake was living up to its name today, the bright morning light glistening white off the water as it meandered its way past the city. It was strange to think; the hot and bitter liquid in my cup was completely unobtainable in Atlantia for the first few years of its existence, a lack of trade trade agreements between us and the coffee producing countries of the world had made my mornings a very difficult time of the day. I rose from my chair to meet the young writer and offered her a seat on the other side of the coffee table looking out over the Mall.

  “So, I guess I should start at the beginning.” I said after a brief exchange of pleasantries. Penny gestured out her arm for me to continue. “I know it’s bad manners to ask,” I started after considering how to begin, “but how old are you, Miss Monroe?”

  “I’m twenty-seven” she said through a demur smile. “and please, it’s just Penny.”

  “Twenty-seven…” I repeated thoughtfully, “wow… if there’s one way to make yourself feel old. So not a native then?” ‘Native’ had become the colloquial term for someone born in Atlantia, being a country made up almost entirely of first-generation immigrants, meeting a ‘native’ was still a fairly uncommon occurrence.

  “Err no. My Parents brought me here from France just before my third birthday.”

  “Ah, France. One of the better countries out there. How much do you know about what it was like living there during your parents time?” I asked, becoming increasingly aware that, so far, it was me asking the questions without having answered any in return.

  “Not much, just the basics. Threat of war and terrorist attack, constant work to make ends meet, endless fights between the political right and left with no actual progress… the usual. They don’t complain about it much though, I think they know that despite the struggle, their lives were much better than most. They left France in political protest rather than for actual necessity. Their neighbours in Lincoln City were from Uganda… I guess that puts it all into context.”

  “Shit, yeah, Uganda will do that.” My mind briefly raced back to the reports of ethnic cleansing and mass murder – one of the first Spartan deployments – before returning to the present. “My childhood would probably have been comparable – similar even – to those of your parents. But in terms of how we came to be here we can probably skip all of that and move back forty odd years to when I graduated college.” I continued to talk, answering the odd question from Penny, clarifying a few details as she tapped furiously on the tablet in her hands. Penny had this ability to be obviously concentrating on what she was writing, yet give off the impression that you had her undivided attention. Her brilliant brown eyes flashed between me and the screen as I span my tale.

  Jesus… Forty years, had it really been that long?

  Chapter 2

  The first step on the road

  I had graduated MIT at the age of twenty-one. I’d had the opportunity to graduate earlier but my final project took a lot longer than I had expected and I had wanted to see it through. In doing so though, I had earned the highest possible marks in my degree in Engineering but that didn’t really do it justice. I had quickly made a name for myself as something of a technological genius; Electronics, programming, mechanics, computing, maths, physics… basically, if it was anything to do with technology, I just understood it. It was like an instinct, I could just ‘see’ the problem, ‘see’ the solution and ‘see’ how to make it happen. The principles all made perfect sense to me, I just… understood.

  “I’m not sure how much you know about how the job market worked back then,” I said to Penny who was still tapping furiously at her screen. “but usually, when someone entered the job market, they would apply to a few dozen companies, hopefully get an invitation to be interviewed at a few of them and - if they were lucky - maybe get an offer for employment from one or two. For me it was almost the reverse of that, my status as the top student at the top engineering school in the world had made me something of a commodity and I had been head hunted by quite a few companies looking to garner my services.

  “What that meant was I, essentially, was interviewing them. They would put their best case forward as to why I should join their company and, after hearing them all out, I would make my decision.”

  After the first eight interviews I had lost the will to live. Each board room, each executive and each of their pitches were pretty much the same as the last: We will give you this much money, this many benefits, this amount of vacation time, stock options and so forth, and at the end of their spiel they would mutter something under a cough about the work they wanted me to do or what my responsibilities would be… It was like mentioning the work was using dirty language, like it debased the negotiation. The problem was, I didn’t see it like that; the work was the most important detail to me, it was my passion. If the work was right, the pay cheque was almost inconsequential. As long as I made enough to cover my bills, money was never important to me.

  I was about to give up, seriously considering striking out on my own as left home for my final interview at a small but influential company called ‘Itek’ – innovative technologies. The drive from my home in Omaha, Nebraska out to the Sunny landscape of Santa Rosa, California was a gruelling but pleasant enough ride, making a road trip out of it and leaving home two days before my appointment allowed me to break the journey up into small, manageable sections. The Itek building itself was a large, squat, 3 story building. You could tell that it had been designed by one of those architects who wanted everything to look modern. Straight lines, and sharp angles, the plain concrete of the walls were interspersed with large bank
s of windows. The landscape around it, however, was stunning.

  Don’t get me wrong, the natural beauty of Nebraska is nothing to turn your nose up at, but the dotted trees along the rolling hills and meadows, accompanied by that warm California sun, took my breath away. With no other signs of civilization any direction, it seemed that this was the only building in the world. The peaceful quiet, only interrupted by the soft breeze against my neck and my footsteps on the parking lot asphalt, gave this place a feeling of calm, collected isolation.

  After introducing myself to a heavy-set receptionist - whose name I promptly forgot - I was left in a waiting area to the side of a line of offices. It wasn’t long before I was shown in to meet the chief executive and immediately, I knew this company was different from all the other interviews I’d had.

  Maria Gonzalez was not your typical CEO and this was not a typical office. There wasn’t a shred of oak furnishings, no fancy pictures on the wall, not even a framed diploma. There was no plush carpet and no interior designed decorations. Instead there were engineering diagrams, circuitry maps, graphs and mathematical equations of every conceivable kind pinned haphazardly around the walls. The room itself didn’t have a desk, or leather chairs or anything else I had come to expect but was instead filled with books, papers, workbenches, computer stations and tool shelves, there was even a 3D printer in one corner. The floor was a marble coloured linoleum with clear rubber mats under the various benches, bookshelves and equipment. Static discharge sockets were dotted everywhere throughout the large room and simple ceiling fans tracked their simple orbits around simple lightbulbs. It was almost like a lab had been mislabelled as the CEO’s office and nobody had bothered to change it.

  For her part, Maria was as far from a CEO as she could’ve been without wearing something with sequins and – just as noticeable – was the absence of the regiment of executives and assistants I had come to expect in these meetings; she was alone. Dr Gonzalez was facing away from me, staring intently at a white board and the diagrams tacked to it. Her raven black hair was pulled into a simple pony tail that fell just past her shoulders. What she was wearing would not only have her kicked out of every other board room I had been to, but also made me feel nervously overdressed. Faded blue jeans hugged her feminine curves while a grease stained white vest top clung to the body of a woman used to hard manual work.

  I’m not sure exactly how long I stood there for, but aside from a few mutterings that I couldn’t make out, Maria hadn’t moved a muscle. I doubted she had even realised I was there. Eventually I cleared my throat, throwing her out of her trance. She spun around to stare at me with the most exquisite eyes I had ever seen. Deep molten pools of Brown bored into me, the sparkle in her eyes betraying the bliss that only concentrating on a passion could bring, a few blinks and it was gone – replaced with a look of curiosity and then sudden realisation as she worked out who she was looking at.

  “Oh Shit, my MIT graduate… person… thing” she spluttered as she strode across her ‘office’ and started digging a desk from beneath a pile of paperwork, magazines and more diagrams, dumping them unceremoniously onto the floor. “I thought your appointment was at three?” she asked, looked at her watched, realised that is was now 3:10, cursed again and started shifting boxes to reveal a couple of plastic chairs. “Sit down, please.” She gestured to one of the chairs as she dug out the second, “I would say I’m usually more organised… but that would be a lie.”

  I smiled inwardly to myself, I liked this woman already. “I would offer to help, but I’m assuming you have a system.” This time allowing my smile to show, I crossed the room and took the chair she had offered.

  “Damn right, organised chaos baby!” she replied casually as she cleared her chair and sat herself down, she noticed my smile and allowed herself to smile back. “Don’t mess with a woman’s system!” she added with a laugh. Her complete lack of formality was a welcome change of pace from what I had come to expect.

  I held my hands up in mock surrender and laughed with her. “Alright then…” she finally said picking up a piece of paper and quickly glancing it over. “As yes, impressive resumé Mister….” Her voice drifted off as she scoured the document in front of her for my name.

  “Please, just call me Marcus.” This seemed to catch her off guard, and for the first time she looked at me properly – as a person, rather than just an appointment. Being spoken to as an equal – I would later learn – was something she didn’t encounter very often, she was either talked down to by men not welcoming a female CEO into the tech club, or grovelled to by employees – potential or current.

  “Nice to meet you Marcus,” she said after appraising me. “So, we’re a new and relatively small company, we’ve only recently had access to the sorts of resources and prestige that allow us to go to school’s like MIT for graduates,” she was talking so fast I was amazed that her lips could keep up with her brain without tripping over her own tongue, “I’ve built this company from the ground up, but I’m doing all the heavy lifting, I’ve got a bunch of techies and half decent engineers upstairs, they’re great for grunt work, but what I really need is an innovator – someone who can solve a puzzle without knowing what the picture is, an out-of-the-box thinker.”

  This went on for a while, but what struck me immediately was the passion that this woman had for her work, not just her company – which she was obviously very proud of – but that actual work. It was… refreshing. There were words like ‘reinvent’ and ‘revolutionise’ and not a single mention of ‘markets’ or ‘profits’ and the more she talked, the more she endeared herself to me.

  Despite all this, it was becoming harder and harder for me to concentrate on what she was saying, and it wasn’t because the speed of her speech, nor even because of the beauty of the face that was reeling out so many words… it was her eyes. Not only were they dancing with the sparkle I had seen earlier, but every few minutes they would dart back to the white board she had been staring at when I’d arrived. It was like talking to someone who is looking at something behind you, eventually you turn around to find out what is so interesting.

  I turned in my chair and looked across at the circuitry diagrams and various schematics that were pinned to the white board. Some equations had been scrawled in blue marker pen along the right-hand side of the board, one of the few sections not covered in paper. Maria had stopped talking, having realised that I was now looking at the object of her distraction.

  “Shit, sorry I…” she huffed and turned in her own seat to look at the whiteboard. “… you ever had one of those problems? like the answer is right there, but you just can’t seem to get a hold of it.”

  Yes… yes, I had.

  I got up from my chair and walked towards the whiteboard, Maria a few steps behind me. It only took me a few seconds to work out what I was looking at. “It’s for a cell phone, right?”

  “Colour me impressed,” she nodded, “one of my engineering staff thought it was the AC system of a car.”

  “So, what’s the problem?” I asked, admiring the elegance of the circuitry.

  “Customer is a cell phone giant, they want to make this phone smaller without losing any of the features, I’m this close to giving up” she huffed again while holding up her thumb and forefinger to demonstrate her point.

  “Well that’s simple. Ionize the battery.”

  Maria scrunched up her eyebrows, examined the diagram and rolled her eyes. “No, that makes the battery bigger, and also produces a shit load of heat. It would be the same size and with the added benefit of melting.”

  “errr… no, it would make the battery longer, not bigger, it would be about 60% of the thickness. If you folded it and joined the cathodes, you’d have a battery that would be slightly fatter, but could still fit in the housing and would only take up about 65 – 70% of the space, add a heat sink in with the exhaust going through the speaker port here…” I pointed at the relevant part of the diagram, “…then that would get rid of your
melting problem. And the whole package would be about….” I paused while I did the calculations in my head. “…12-15% smaller.”

  “No, that can’t wo…” she stared intently at the diagrams, her mind racing to adapt the current layout to my specifications. “but that….” Another pause, her hand moved to the back of her head, eye eyebrows furrowed in concentration. “but then how does the…” after another long pause, her eyebrows raised as the new design suddenly clicked into place in her mind. “holyfuckingshit!”

  She picked up a marker and - after wiping away the previous equations - started doing the calculations that I had done in my head. It took her fifteen minutes of furious scribbling to confirm what I had told her. She turned and looked at me with a look of awe and excitement, “if you come to work for me, I will have your babies!”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at this as we both made our way back to the table, “That fucking thing has been sat on my board for three god damned weeks!” she exclaimed, falling back into her chair, “three weeks! And you fix it in three minutes! Do you know how much money that will make this company?” It was the first time I had heard her even mention money in the entirety of our interview, I shook my head while still smiling at her reaction. “Well, neither do I, but it’s gonna be a shit load!” I loved this woman’s candour.

  She clapped her hands together and stamped her feet into the floor a few times as she allowed the excitement and relief wash over her. “seriously,” she started after she had time to compose herself, “what do I need to do to get you to work for me?”