She didn’t think about it.
Which made it hard when there was someone who might need her help, just on the other side of a hospital door.
SEVEN
“THIS IS NOT THE WAY to the house,” Rachel told her partner.
“Very observant,” Santino replied, turning down a narrow one-way street. They passed a Vietnamese import shop, followed by a posh after-hours bistro and a butcher’s.
“There is half of a pig in that window,” Rachel said. “And I don’t mean enough parts of a pig to add up to a half, or even a front-end-versus-back-end deal. That’s the half of a pig you get when you have a whole pig, a bandsaw, and you want to see what happens when one meets the other.”
“I saw it,” he said. “I bet it’s delicious. Find me a parking space.”
She sighed and threw her scans down the road. “One block up, right side, behind the blue Toyota. Better hurry, there’s a minivan coming from the other direction.”
Santino swore and hit the gas. His tiny hybrid shot through the intersection and zipped into the space. They pretended not to notice the hand gestures from the family in the minivan with the Ohio plates.
Part of northeast D.C. used to be the warehouse district, and the neighborhood was partially gentrified in the way of persons young enough to work full days and still spend all night partying. Rachel felt the vibrations of heavy machinery beneath her feet; on the other side of the street, the air surrounding a nightclub was brightly blurred by the sound of a band warming up.
“If I’d known you wanted to go out, I would have changed,” she said.
“I’m not taking you to a show,” he said. “I’m taking you to school. You remember this morning, when I said I knew people who could make the types of bombs that could blow up an entire city street?”
“And we ignored you because that’s total bosh, and you threw a tiny hissy fit? Yes. Vividly.”
“Well,” he said, his colors firmly set in a good-humored purple. “I’ve decided that wasn’t your fault. You know that Sherlock Holmes quote, the one about eliminating the impossible?”
“The Sign of the Four, Chapter 6,” Rachel said. An instructor in the Warrant Officer program had assigned that book as required reading. “Pedantic Holmes to Doormat Watson: ‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’”
“Well, my good Rachel,” he said as he guided them down an alley. “How can you eliminate anything if you don’t know what’s possible?”
With that, he opened an old fire door and gestured for her to enter.
She stepped into a small lobby, beaten down by time and encrusted in filth. There was enough space for the narrow front door, a series of mailboxes embedded in the wall, a stairwell, and an ancient cage-lift elevator set behind a folding scissor door. A man in a proper business suit, his conversational colors a more intense version of the same anxious orange she had seen everywhere since Gayle Street, stepped out of the stairwell. His core color was that strange sort of yellow she associated with prescription medications, and he nodded at them as he went to open a mailbox. Rachel threw a scan towards the elevator, and decided that the man in the suit had the right idea.
“Nope,” Santino said, heading her off before she could reach the stairs. “This way,” he said, pulling the elevator gate to the side. The old metal shrieked; the man in the lobby glanced at them, eyes widening and colors fading in disbelief as he realized what she and Santino were about to do.
Rachel shared his opinion. As Santino stepped into the elevator, the entire contraption dropped under his weight. Santino didn’t have to duck, not quite, but with barely four inches between the ceiling and the top of his head, it was a tight fit for him.
“Stairs.” Rachel said, pointing over her shoulder. “Nice, safe, well-mannered stairs.”
“Yeah, but you’re a noob,” he said. “It’s policy for all newcomers to use the front door.”
“Because they don’t want us to come back?”
Santino ignored her and waited for her to step inside. She did, cautiously. The elevator smelled like stale crackers and burnt motor oil, and the cab dropped again as she joined her weight to his. As her partner pulled the steel security door shut, the man with the yellow core had a clear view of Rachel, and was staring at her in yellow-orange concern.
She winked and gave him a little wave, and his concern faded slightly.
Santino flipped the metal panel covering the buttons and jabbed the one for the top floor as hard as he could.
“Is something supposed to happen?” she asked after a few moments.
“It sticks. Give it a second.” He bounced his thumb against the button until the elevator finally began to creak its way upwards.
She ran a scan through the elevator’s mechanisms and found them to be… Well, the kindest description that came to mind was antique, but she was happy to substitute ancient or frayed or even churning broken deathwheels for accuracy’s sake.
“You sure this is safe?” she asked her partner, wide-eyed.
“Oh yeah, definitely,” he said, nodding. The car threw itself sideways; Rachel grunted and grabbed the metal cage to keep her balance, and Santino reached up with both hands to steady himself against the ceiling.
They watched four floors drop away without speaking, and then the rattling elevator jerked to a stop. Rachel ripped the gate aside, then wrestled with the security door until she could squirm through the gap.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she gasped. Santino grinned in blues and purples as he took her by her shoulders, then spun her around.
“Wow,” she heard herself say, her fallback phrase for when words failed her.
Rachel recognized that tunnel vision was more mental than physical; she had learned that when her stress levels amped up, her scans battened down. There was nothing which would have prevented her from seeing this from four stories down, except for the instinctual need to focus on the here-and-nowism of that death trap of an elevator. And now that the threat had faded, she could finally notice the door.
She knew it was a door because it couldn’t be anything else. Two gas lamps, wrought iron twisted around bubbled glass spheres, were positioned to both sides of a metal sheet which began at the floor and stopped halfway up the wall. The lamps had been turned off, useless on a day like today when the door was bathed in autumn sunlight from the skylight overhead. The door itself was made from half a hundred pieces of metal, copper and bronze, tin, silver, maybe even gold… and yet looked nothing like patchwork. The artist—like the door itself, its creator could have been nothing other than what he or she was—had blended these different metals together into a whole. There were seams, of course, transitions between the elements, but these were to her mind like crossing from the grassy path to the stream; different, noticeably so, but nevertheless part of the same grand design.
The effect was only slightly spoiled by the plaque the artist had incorporated into the door at eye level, the one with SPEAK, FRIEND, AND ENTER picked out in raised text.
“Oh, nerds,” she sighed.
“It’s a combination lock,” he said. “Takes a little bit of thinking to get in.”
“Come on, even I’ve seen those movies,” she said.
“Okay,” Santino told her. “You’re so smart, you open it.”
Rachel stepped forward and steeled herself to quote Gandalf, but Santino was vividly purple, sure she was about to fail in a hilarious way. She shut her mouth and scanned the door instead. Six inches thick; hollow but still solid. Its workings were a mess of gears. There wasn’t so much as a speck of digital machinery, but the right side of the frame and certain words within the plaque gleaming from otherwise unseen traces… Ah! Her old buddy, squalene.
Thank goodness for bodily secretions, she thought, and pressed her own fingertips against the ENTER, shining from where all of those who had come before her had touched it.
There
was a small click at the edge of hearing, and the door swung open on hidden hinges.
Santino’s colors drooped as she pushed the door wide. “So close.”
She was about to nail him with a snitty response when she finally looked past the door to take in the room behind it.
It was an industrial loft the size of a football field. The west side of the room was baking from the late afternoon sun coming through the windows; the rest of it was comfortably warm. Brick and beaten wood formed the walls and floors, with iron peeking through the cracks. The ceiling might have been wood or plaster—she couldn’t tell without running different frequencies—but it didn’t matter which since it had been painted in a deep cobalt blue and dotted with white and yellow stars. She thought the artist who made the front door had likely had a hand in building this celestial temple, as planets cut and shaped from woven scraps of metal dropped from invisible cords in a rough mimicry of the solar system.
Tables lifted straight from a high school science lab were scattered across half of the loft in no apparent order. Their thick slate tops, scarred from dropped machinery and chemical burns, were barely visible beneath the tangle of equipment. She saw art supplies, welding tools, a stack of exotic woods, racks of colored liquids with handwritten labels she couldn’t read…
There was no other furniture except a couch which would have been happier back out on the curb where it had been found, an industrial refrigerator humming in the corner, and a few old blackboards on rollers. These were positioned around the room; other than the odd arcane scrawl, these seemed to serve no other purpose than to hold receipts. The real body of written work was at the far end of the loft, where a computer lab was set apart from the main space by a glass divider running from floor to ceiling. It reminded Rachel of the conference room at First District Station, a fishbowl of a space, on display to the public but walled off by glass windows. There was writing on this glass, streaks which started three feet above the ground and ended at about head-height, and fluoresced in the telltale dust of dry-erase markers. She flipped to reading mode to try to understand what had been written there, but while she could make out the letters and the odd Greek symbol or two, she understood nothing.
She did, however, recognize Santino’s handwriting.
“Come here often?” she asked him, starting into the room.
“When I can,” he said. “I lease a table here. My landlord doesn’t like it when I build robots.”
“No, your landlord is fine with you building robots. It’s the part where you nearly burned her house to the ground that got her worried,” Rachel joked, but with half an ear. She was mesmerized by the others in the loft. As odd as the room was, it had nothing on the five people who stared at her and Santino as they walked through the front door. Four men—boys, really, the oldest couldn’t have been too far into his twenties—looked up from their worktables and blinked at them, their conversational colors showing irritation at the interruption. Rachel did a double take at the boy closest to her: she was no stranger to the club scene and had seen plugs in ears wide enough to hold a garden hose, but this was the first time she had seen a 20mm taper sticking out of a stretched hole on the skin on either side of a human being’s neck.
The fifth was a girl with her hair cut and colored in an emerald green bob. She was behind the glass wall at the end of the room, but she brightened in happy yellows and golds when she saw Santino. The girl banged on the glass and waved.
Santino led the way, weaving between tables and projects like a well-trained mouse in a familiar maze. He took Rachel to the computer lab and stopped in front of a silver arch in the glass. The two of them kept to the side as the girl hit some buttons on a keypad and a vacuum lock released the door.
“Santino!” The girl leapt at him and he swung her around. Rachel couldn’t help but notice how the girl’s clothes seemed to be made entirely of pieces of long unwoven string. She could never follow the Bohemian lifestyle herself: it would take her half of the day to put on the uniform.
“Hey, Silver Bell,” Santino said, grinning.
“It’s Bell. Just Bell,” the girl said to Rachel as Santino set her down. “Unless you want to guess the day I was born. Helpful hint—you can shop for my birthday and Christmas presents on the same trip!”
“Hi Bell. I’m Rachel.” She smiled at the girl as she peered through Bell’s vivid surface colors to find a smooth gray core beneath. Interesting, Rachel thought. While gray surface colors were nearly always some flavor of sadness, gray cores almost always meant a sharp, focused mind.
“Where’s Zia today?” Bell asked Santino.
Her partner’s surface colors blushed bright red. “I didn’t plan on coming,” he said. “We were in the neighborhood, and I thought Rachel might want to see this place.”
“All are welcome,” Bell said automatically.
“She’s welcome if she brought money!” shouted one of the men from across the loft. Two of the others snickered.
“Agent Peng might make a donation,” Santino said, hitting her title a little too hard to be an accident. Rachel took the hint and let the flap on her suit coat slide over her hip. The bright green and gold of her OACET badge flashed out from beneath the wool.
“Jeez!” Bell’s colors flashed orange-yellow in excitement. “Guys, she’s an Agent!”
“Did the Agent bring money?” the same man quipped.
“Ignore him,” Bell said, as Rachel laughed.
“It’s fine. That’s not the reaction I usually get,” Rachel told the girl. The men’s colors had barely flickered when they heard she was a cyborg. Anonymity was refreshing.
“Zia comes here a lot. They’ve busted their questions on her already.”
“Ah, right,” Rachel agreed. It went without saying that Zia—tall, blond, buxom, Zia—would have gotten their attention. (Zia got more attention than pretty much every other woman on the planet, and in Rachel’s opinion, deservedly so.)
“What’s your specialty?” Bell asked. The girl was standing high on her toes, her surface colors a bubbly curious yellow. Rachel felt a little like a live frog on the dissection table. “Zia does astrophysics. She’s the one who aligned the planets.”
Rachel blinked, then realized the girl was gesturing towards the metal solar system overhead. “Oh, right,” she said. “My specialty’s perception. I can see different electromagnetic fields.”
“Really! Look!” Bell grabbed Rachel’s hand and ran her left pinkie finger over Rachel’s palm. “Look look look—Can you see that? Or feel it?”
Rachel shot a wry glare at Santino. “Depends,” she told Bell. “What are you trying to do?”
“Parylene-coated neodymium magnet!” Bell said, holding up her pinkie. “I got an implant after OACET came out.”
“Oh…” Rachel said limply. “So you can… wipe out credit cards?”
Bell’s colors glazed over and she let go of Rachel’s hand. “You’re the Agent who works with Santino at the MPD, aren’t you.”
It hadn’t been a question, but Rachel nodded anyway.
The girl’s colors softened to a pitiful rose, and Rachel sent a quick message to Santino’s phone to remind her to kill him when they got home.
“Hey,” called one of the guys from his worktable halfway across the room. “Weren’t you the Agent in that video? The one that went viral a few months ago?”
“Yup,” Rachel answered.
“Did that really happen?” the kid asked. “Did Senator Hanlon pay those guys to murder somebody?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
Rachel laughed. “You know how hard it is to arrest a Senator? Even their red tape has its own lawyer.”
“Sucks.”
“Yeah,” Rachel agreed as she walked over to his desk. The kid stunk. His hair was a nest, and she doubted he had showered in a year. He was also putting the finishing touches on the most incredible piece of marquetry she had ever seen outside of a museum.
“Holy Jesus, that is glorious,” she said, flipping frequencies to take in its full beauty. The kid had carved pathways across the lid of a mahogany jewelry box, and inlaid those with exotic woods and mother-of-pearl. It reminded her of a Buddhist mandala, but made from polished slivers instead of paint or silk. “What is it?”
He stared at her blankly, then lifted the lid. “It’s a box.”
“Good job,” she said, and went to rejoin Santino and Bell.
“He doesn’t mean to be rude. Jake just gets lost in his work,” Bell whispered apologetically. “He does art fabs. Tech doesn’t do him.”
Rachel smiled politely as she reached out through her link to the OACET server. The best course of action was to record the conversation, then have Santino translate it for her later.
“Do you want the tour?” Bell asked her. “I mean, Santino can show you around, but I’ve got a tour speech I give to potential donors.”
“I’d like the tour,” Rachel said. “If you’ve got time.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve got at least another hour before my print is done,” Bell said, looking over a bare shoulder towards the glass cage. “I’m trying out a new design so I need to get real-time data on it.”
“What is it?” Santino asked her.
“Expandable choker with LED capacity,” the girl said. “3D jewelry is catching on in the clubs. There’s a store downtown with a decent MakerBot, and they pay me for new designs. The club kittens pay crazy for a bracelet or necklace fresh from the printer, and if I can get it to light up… The store gets fifty bucks for a tenth of a spool, and I get twenty-five percent of each sale? Yeah, I’ll take that.”
“Nice!” Santino said. “That’ll help with tuition.”
The girl’s colors faded almost immediately, and Rachel jabbed Santino in his side. Rachel had no idea what Bell was talking about, but it was clear the girl couldn’t deal with the idea of tuition.
Maker Space Page 8