At once, an unseen storm ceased. Stypek blinked, and blinked again. No sooner had her lips touched his disorderly hair than a feeling of deep calm rose from places unknown to fill the crannies of his mind. The gaps of understanding that yawned between his world and this one had narrowed. It was as though the maps of two universes melted and flowed toward one another until there was no seam but one small crossing of only minor disorder.
“Maj…mir...Mrs. Payton. What did you just say?”
“I said, ‘Here’s a good-luck kiss from an African queen.’ Not the boat, either.” She bent down and kissed the top of his head again. “And another one for good measure. You’re gonna need ‘em over here!”
Stypek marveled. The stuttering of words in his mind had ceased. There was no longer the constant keening as of some distant wind to interfere with how he heard her. The words no longer came through stilted or, in some cases, only partly heard. Everything around him—the people, the shoes, the room, the broad world outside—seemed somehow indescribably closer.
“You…you healed the mapping.”
“Get up, honey. I need to take your inseam.” Stypek rose as commanded. Neuitha knelt once again, and stretched the yellow tape down the length of his left leg. “Now, I healed the what?”
“The semantic gap between dissimilar continua. It would have healed on its own, and I could feel it happening, but the old books all said it was nonlinear and would take time. Even years.”
“Mmmm. Is that some kind of football injury?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
Neuitha jotted some glyphs down on a scrap of paper clamped to a wooden board. Stypek now recognized them as numbers.
“You’re a 36. All leg, and no meat on your bones. What’s Carolyn been feeding you?”
He closed his eyes and smiled. “Spam Muffin Stackers. Dipped in coffee.” Stypek savored the memory. “Mmm. Delicious.”
She looked up and squinted at him. “Just when you start to make sense, you get weird again. Stand still. I gotta get your waist.” Neuitha reached around him and pulled the tape tight just above the belt line. She paused and stared at the lump under his shirt that hid the hilt of the wereglass. “You got an umbrella stuck in your pants, honey? That’s gonna throw things off.”
Stypek shrugged but said nothing. As hiding places went, it was only so-so—and it had been poking him in a very bad spot. He reached into his shirt and drew the wereglass out into the open. Seven Opportunities still spun and gleamed in its depths.
“Ah! A lightsaber! My boys must’ve watched those movies a hundred times!” She reached for the clipboard again and got to her feet. “32 waist. You should eat more.” She scribbled numbers on the clipboard, and looked up at him, her face showing deep concern. “Back home…back where you come from…were you poor?”
Stypek nodded. “Spellbending is hit-and-miss.”
“Lots of that going around. My Calvin’s been out of work for six months, and all he does is watch TV. Now look here: When they start paying you, don’t hoard it. Eat real food.” A young woman dashed into the room. Neuitha handed her the clipboard with a few curt instructions to fetch back several items in Stypek’s size.
Stypek looked at the wereglass. “Do you eat real food, Mrs. Payton?”
She put one hand on his arm. “Realer than Spam Stackers!”
“But not as real as food should be.” Stypek turned the wereglass over so that it pointed at the zenith. “Will you accept the blessing of a down-on-his-luck spellbender?”
She laughed. “Honey, I’ll take all the blessings I can get!”
Stypek slowly closed his eyes. Carolyn had needed an alchemist to bring her machine back to life. An alchemist had come. Without a spell to shape it, an Opportunity released into the Continuum was a reshuffling of the deck; a new deal a little to one side or the other of the petal of the unfolding world where you stood, chosen less by what you wanted than what you needed—and as often as not, what you deserved, even if it was neither.
Would a Queen of Africa be better off…in Africa?
He swallowed hard. Would Bartholomew Stypek be better off back in Trynng Brokklyn? Who but the Continuum could know such things?
She had somehow made the very uneven and possibly deadly barriers between his world and this one fade and nearly vanish. He owed her. He reached for the highest light in the swirling stack of seven.
“Should I make a wish?”
Stypek shook his head. “The Continuum knows what you need. We just have to turn it loose.”
His fingers closed on the Opportunity.
Ping!
Again, the ring of new possibility shook the air around them. It faded away slowly, the vibrato echo of a distant choir reverberating as though in a broad vessel of pure glass.
“Hoo-whee! You’d better turn the volume down on that thing!” She clapped his arm again. “Thank you, Mr. Stypek. Nobody ever gave me a Jedi blessing before!”
One of the young women bustled in and dropped still more bundles of clothing on the pile. “That’s the list. Did something break in here? Oh, Neuitha, Calvin’s looking for you.”
Neuitha picked her head up sharply, pursed her lips for a moment, and hurried out of the mirrored room. Stypek followed her, the wereglass still in his hand.
In the aisle beside the sales desk a tall man waited, an archduke by the look of him. When he saw Neuitha he drew her up in his arms and lifted her clear off the floor for a moment. “Hey, baby, talk about luck! Sammy’s moving to Baltimore to live near his kids, and the foreman called to see if I wanted his job. Score!” He bent down and kissed the top of her head. “You’re my good-luck charm, like you always been!”
She got up on tiptoe and kissed Calvin quickly on the lips. “Backatcha, boyfriend!” She smoothed her smock and looked back to Stypek. “I guess the Force is just all over the place today. Hey, Mr. Stypek, don’t run away—you still have to try all this stuff on!”
Stypek nodded. He looked at the wereglass before putting it back into his shirt. Where there had been seven lights were now six.
19: Brandon
“Message from Mr. Amirault,” Pyxis said from his suit coat pocket.
Brandon paused in the doorway of his office, and grunted. The Executive Vice President of Manufacturing always sent himself straight to messaging, even when Brandon was in his office. Rudy had his cell number but wouldn’t use it, even on company time. He had the same aversion to ear contact that some of his engineers had to eye contact. But unlike his engineers (who did startling work without eye contact) Rudy’s problem wasn’t shyness, nor Asperger’s, nor anything else beyond managerial cowardice. He was so afraid of losing an argument that he simply refused to engage.
Brandon pulled his tapper from his coat. “Play it.”
The display split, with Pyxis at the top, and Rudy beneath her. Brandon often imagined his assistant dumping a tall cup of syrupy virtual coffee on the top of his (unfortunately non-virtual) boss’s greasy combover. “Brandon. Amirault. I dialed up the floorcams over at 800 just now. Good work. Now, we’ve got a line start on the calendar for Friday morning. If the tooling didn’t get too banged up, I want that start to happen on schedule. It’ll be a great test of recovery time after a line failure.” Rudy reached up with a toothpick and dug for something between his yellowed teeth. “I’m going to tell Porkadero’s to set aside the Muskie Room for us, starting 6 PM sharp. I’ll be there, and if your team can pull it off, I’ll shake every single hand going in. We’ll party all night.”
Party all night. Right. Like everybody was supposed to party last Friday, and the Friday after Labor Day, the Friday a month before that, and two Fridays in July.
“If the start fails, we may have to talk a little harder about ARFF’s future. Pencil me in for 9 AM a week from today, just in case. No need to call, just acknowledge. Thanks.” Rudy’s image on the tapper crunchlined. Pyxis knew better than to ask if Brandon wanted to replay it.
“Acknowledge,” he said, an
d tucked the tapper back in his pocket.
Building 800’s assembly floor looked like a machine shop with weeds growing up through the concrete. They were metal weeds with petals reaching upward: the hundreds of Positioner robots, foam-coated hands now at rest, fingers curled slightly as though waiting to catch the pennies from heaven that Brandon had promised the Board but simply could not deliver.
It looked like they had one more chance.
Brandon threaded his way through the jungle of robotic drills and welders, clapping the arms of weary engineers and offering words of encouragement. It was Monday morning and many had been there since Friday’s debacle, catching a few hours of sleep in the building cafeteria, slumped in chairs or just sprawled on the floor. He had sent more than a few home. His rule of thumb was simple: when you could smell an employee over the reek of grease, iron, and electronics, it was time for eight hours and a shower.
Too much management by wandering around and too little sleep had left him in violation of his own rule. Granted, he’d caught a few hours, sprawled out on the couch in his office with his stuffed moose for a pillow. There was a shower in the corporate gym attached to building 214—at the other end of the campus and three quarters of a mile away. A shower would put him in an immeasurably better mood. That was, however, a long walk and an hour away from the task. There was still a lot of work to be done.
Brandon stopped and leaned on the tall blue control cabinet of a complicated mill/drill table. By any objective measure they were doing well: The repair crews had mostly completed their work, long before he thought they would. His estimate of damage to the floor’s tooling had been way high. Yes, over a thousand parts and nine complete or nearly complete 200-pound copiers had been thrown every which way in the wake of Simple Simon’s panic. It was hard to internalize the fact that Building 800’s machine tools were armored, precisely against the possibility that an occasional TOSS toss would go sour. Most had retractable steel shutters that could be snapped closed if Simon detected a rogue drive shaft spinning in its direction. The idiot program had managed to get a few shutters up in the first milliseconds of the meltdown, but after half a second or so it was pure ballistics.
The stitches were in place and the band-aids had been applied. Now, if he could only figure out who’d been waving the knife.
Across the next narrow aisle, some man-sized Positioners were playing three-corner catch with a main drive motor, while an engineer watched diagnostics on a tapper screen. The engineer turned toward Brandon and gave a quick thumbs-up. Brandon returned the gesture and struggled to generate a smile. Grimaces were easier—and more honest.
In the broad aisle between the edge of the tooling and the walls, the engineers were testing the Outfielders. They were Positioners on nimble wheeled bases, designed to patrol the edges of the action and catch mis-thrown parts. While three engineers watched, one Outfielder hurled a xerographic drum down the aisle as though it were a football, and the others zipped and darted to position themselves so that one of their ambulatory robot hands would be in place to receive it, no matter how wild the throw went.
The drum wobbled through the air, spinning in three dimensions. The movement among the Outfielders was coordinated: Each knew where the others were, and at some point all knew which among their group would best be able to follow the movement of the part being tracked, allowing the others to get out of its way. A foot-wide foam-coated hand reached up, cast back and forth for a moment like the head of a snake, and then closed its fingers on the drum.
Brandon nodded, with grudging admiration. The coordinated motion of the Outfielders was graceful and uncanny, almost like some inhuman dance. The engineering was brilliant. The engineering was brilliant everywhere around him. The research that had gone into ARFF was minting new mechanical engineering Ph.D’s every week. All the parts of the process worked beautifully, when tested alone. When tested together, ARFF became a bridge just a little too far…
“Mr. Romero! Incoming!”
Instinct and old experience kicked in. Brandon threw himself down and to the right, into the shadow of another X-Y table. Something hissed through the air above him and struck the pillar of a CNC milling machine: a main imaging lens, by the look of it. Glass fragments scattered to the floor all around him with small sharp sounds. He was suddenly very glad for his hard hat.
Two engineers hurried up to him and helped him to his feet. “Hey, we’re sorry! That was supposed to go in the other direction.”
Moments later, five or six smallish double-humped machines converged on them, all peeping “Dibs! Dibs! Dibs!” in high piping voices. Then they began circling like pigeons in a town square, picking up the larger fragments with small articulated pincers and sucking up the dust with hidden vacuum fans.
Trilobites, the engineers called them. Brandon couldn’t help but think they looked like motorized toilet seats with a stainless-steel butt protruding through the middle of each.
One Trilobyte spotted an outlier fragment, and darted out into the aisle to grab it. “Dibs! Dibs!”
Brandon and the engineers watched in silence, until the Trilobytes finished inhaling the fragments and all returned to their charging stations underneath the machine tools. “Uh, guys, why do these damned things talk?”
Both engineers looked down at the now-clean concrete. The older one spoke. “It was a joke. They use a learning algorithm that rewards them when they’re first to reach a dropped part. They compete for points. We thought it was funny.”
Brandon tried not to snap at them. “It isn’t. Turn it off.”
“We’ll submit a change request to AILING. It’s in the AI somewhere.”
Brandon looked at his watch again. He set off across the aisle toward the main door without a word. All of his problems were in the AI somewhere. He had a mind to submit a few change requests to AILING himself.
Just before Brandon reached out to strong-arm the big glass doors out of the assembly floor, his top security guy Marty Cordovan tapped the Open button from the lobby side. The door swung back. Brandon waved him back out into the lobby, where things were quieter.
Goateed, pallid, overweight, balding—with the small rectangular black-rimmed glasses it was almost a uniform. Still, he was as detail-oriented as a manager would want, in a field that was a haystack of details hiding a jumble of used syringes.
“I have the massaged Plasma logs for Friday night!” It wasn’t Marty who spoke, but his tapper, tucked in an elaborate tooled leather shoulder holster just forward of the man’s left hip. The holster had a cutaway to reveal the tapper’s display.
His tapper AI had the creepiest kind of archetype: a Class 3 caricature of Marty himself, only younger, thinner, tanner and with a full head of hair. Perhaps most disturbing of all was the archetype’s manic enthusiasm, which Brandon doubted had ever been Marty’s way. “Better still, we identified the Plasma node where the intruder came from!” The cartoon Marty waved a sheet in the air.
“Great!” Brandon reached into his sportcoat and drew out his own tapper. Marty simultaneously pulled his from the holster. The two tappers tapped at their corners, and a cartoon manila folder passed from Virtual Marty’s hands to Pyxis’.
“Thanks, Marty.”
The man nodded and edged off toward the elevators without having spoken a physical word. “I’ll status you this afternoon!” Virtual Marty exulted from his holster.
Brandon sighed, his tapper still in hand. “Pyxis, where’s that node?”
His assistant pulled a sheet from the manila folder. “Lab 18, Building 845.”
“Mmm. That’s Landscheidt’s turf. Find him and tell him I’m coming over. We’ll meet him at the front door, no excuses.
We. Uggh. Brandon dropped his tapper back in his coat pocket.
Motive. He needed a motive. Brandon hunched his shoulders against a stiff wind under a gray sky, glad for a chance to pace in a straight line and let himself think. Of all the damfool things for a foreign power to attack…a copier factory
? Or was some cashiered staffer getting revenge?
Nobody who had enough knowledge of ARFF to bring it down had been fired in almost eighteen months. It was considered a plum job, with good Christmas parties, gym memberships, and free AI Coke Freestyle machines in every corner of every building on the campus. Besides, line starts averaged one per month. Brandon often wondered what they did the rest of the time.
As good as Marty Cordovan was, he and his people could not isolate the malware itself, which had vanished as soon as the line went down. In a middle-of-the-night status call Virtual Marty had called it “a good trick!” which was probably hacker code for “we used to think that was impossible.”
Without a motive or a malware file, Brandon could only come to one conclusion: It was a perimeter test, which punched through their defenses and dropped a simple core bomb before vanishing, having proven out whatever exploit had given them access to Plasmanet. His contact at the FBI was unconvinced, and demanded proof that it was something more than a local software failure before investigating. It was a sort of virtual habeas corpus: Produce the malware, or there’s no case.
Brandon was convinced that the real attack, whatever its mission, would happen soon. Back when he had been put in charge of ARFF, an old friend at the Syracuse ATF office had greased his permit for an Urban Disorder Defense Equipment Repository for the whole Zertek campus. Every major building now had a secret safe full of shotguns and tear gas, against the sort of rioting that had left Zertek’s Syracuse office and warehouse looted and burning during the awful summer of 2019.
Alas, shotguns would not help him with this sort of attack, and it was making him nuts.
Lab 18 was smallish, barely twenty by forty, and mostly empty. There was an ancient HP oscilloscope on a cart, and a number of boxes that had been packed and taped but left on the benches. “We consolidated the OAF labs upstairs back in May. This was our skunkworks, and we outgrew it.”
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 13