R. C. was a slim, well-dressed African American man in his early sixties with graying hair and a small soul patch. He wore sunglasses pushed high on his forehead and looked like he could have been a professor at Morehouse or UGA, not an audio engineer and CEO.
“Hello, Jack. Have a seat.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He didn’t look completely at ease about having a young woman wearing a helmet showing my face sitting in his office, but he was more comfortable with RH tech than Mrs. Carmichael.
“I miss the old days when I got to see you face to face,” he said.
“I’d have to charge you a lot more for support.”
“You’d be worth it,” said R. C. “I’ll bet I can get you back down here in person in September for the NOD Music Festival.”
The festival always had top acts across several genres. Maybe Poly could come with me?
“If I can bring a guest, I’d love to come down.”
“New lady friend?” said R. C.
“More than just a friend,” I said. “She’s my new business partner and quite an amazing woman.”
“Bring her down and leave enough time for dinner,” said R. C. “I want to get to know her and ask her what she sees in you.”
“I’ve often wondered the same thing,” I said, smiling. “How are your kids?”
I didn’t ask about his wife. She’d been killed in a side-on collision two years ago. The Galactics could cure cancer but they couldn’t stop drunken teenagers from speeding through intersections in manually operated over-sized pickup trucks.
“Charli is working for GalCon Systems in Pittsburgh,” he said. “She loves it. She’s doing research into using strategically placed congruencies to improve concert hall acoustics.”
I was impressed. Galactic Congruent Technologies is the top Terran company for congruency R&D.
“Great,” I said. “She takes after her dad. What about Ray Ray?”
“I’m not so sure about him,” said R. C. “He got his engineering degree from Tech a few years back, you’ll remember.”
I nodded. Or Emma Ann nodded. Whatever.
“Now he’s working for a fabrication company out by Six Flags, but I’m not thrilled with what I hear.”
“Oh?”
“He says they’re working on something really big, but he can’t say a word about it. He signed a non-disclosure agreement. Then his voice gets tight in a way that tells me he’s not just excited, he’s worried.”
“What’s the name of the company?”
“O’Sullivan Fabrication.”
“Who’s O’Sullivan?” I asked my phone.
“The full name of the company is John L. O’Sullivan Fabrication, Inc.,” said my phone. “O’Sullivan was an editor and columnist who coined the term Manifest Destiny back in 1845.”
“Sounds like an Earth First Militant company to me,” I said to myself. At least I thought I did.
“What?” said R. C. and Emma Ann.
“Just a second,” I said, focusing on my phone. “Who owns it?”
“Somebody named Rice Tulane,” it replied.
Pieces were coming together. Those were two more top southern college names, like Duke Vanderbilt, the owner of Factor-E-Flor. I was getting a bad feeling about this.
“It’s no big deal,” I told R. C., and by extension Emma Ann as well. “I just wanted more background.”
By now we’d had enough personal conversation to satisfy south Georgia business conventions. R. C. would be getting around to why he wanted to talk to me soon.
“That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” said R. C. “I haven’t heard from Ray Ray in a week and that’s not like him. I’ve left messages, but he hasn’t called me back. I want you to look into O’Sullivan Fabrication and see if he’s in some kind of trouble.”
I looked at R. C., but didn’t really see him. My mind was racing at light speed, trying to connect all the dots.
“Are you okay, Jack?” he said, seeing my expression. “I’ll pay for your time to investigate. Just don’t let Ray Ray find out.”
“I won’t,” I said, “and you don’t need to pay me. I have my own reasons for checking out O’Sullivan Fabrication.”
I heard a soft whistle in my ear.
“Emma Ann?”
“Sorry,” she whispered. “Sounds like something big.”
“You have no idea,” I said.
“Let me know if there’s any way I can help,” said Emma Ann.
“I may take you up on that,” I said.
“Did you say something?” asked R. C.
“Just talking to myself,” I said.
* * * * *
Aside from a machine that insisted on printing Weird Al Yankovic live comedy album footage on the B-side of every DVD it duplicated, the preventive maintenance at NOD Music went smoothly. Emma Sue gave me her contact information so I could get in touch if I needed her help. She might be another good hire for Xenotech Support in the future, once she left Remote Hands and I wasn’t bound by a non-solicitation agreement. I took care of the rest of my Remote Hands maintenance sessions for clients in Macon, Gainesville, and Dalton—other Georgia cities more than fifty miles from my apartment—on automatic pilot.
Something big was up. I suspected what it might be and who was responsible, but I wasn’t sure why. Plenty of lawn clippings had been teleporting into Anthony Zwilniki’s grajja factory. WT&F hadn’t been the only company fabbing rabbots.
Chapter 11
“He owes me what you’d call a ‘life-debt.’”
— Qui-gon Jinn
It was a pleasure to work from home this afternoon and not worry about driving back from a client’s office through Atlanta’s horrendous rush hour traffic. I was worried about Poly, though. She must really be focused on her research project if she hadn’t even had time to leave me a text. I hoped she’d be in touch soon.
When you’re waiting for something important I often find it’s helpful to take a shower. It’s a way of harnessing the power of Murphy’s Law for your benefit, sort of like how your meal always arrives as soon as you leave your table to use the restroom at a restaurant. Besides, I’d been wearing my RH Prime suit for over four hours. I really needed one.
I removed the rig’s VR helmet, then stripped off the tight-fitting, sensor-covered bodysuit, turning it inside out in the process. I found my bottle of RH-approved spray cleaner and deodorizer under the sink in my bathroom and thoroughly sprayed my suit and the inside of my helmet so they would be ready the next time I had a Remote Hands session. I took care to only use cleaning products approved by RH on the suit and helmet and was a fanatic about keeping them clean.
When we went camping, my step-dad always said, “If you take care of your equipment, it will take care of you,” and that was a piece of fatherly advice I always followed. The one time I didn’t clean my suit and helmet and had to put them on again a few days later, the smell was enough to convince me to do the right thing in the future.
I turned the bodysuit right-side out and fitted it on its special frame—sort of like a dressmaker’s dummy with a Styrofoam head—so that none of the sensor wires would get crimped, then put the helmet on top. Once, I’d left the helmet on the floor and tripped over it, stubbing my toe. The impact must have crossed some sensor wires and created artificial synesthesia. On my next Remote Hands session I heard green sounds, saw peppermint, and smelled French horns. I had to postpone that support call until I could repair the problematic circuits.
As I expected, my Earl Grey shower program had just moved from its stinging hot needles to penetrate deep muscles phase into its final intense blast of frigidly cold spray phase when Poly called. I’d been smart and had told my phone to relay any calls from Poly to my not-so-bright shower A.I.
Poly’s voice was lower-pitched than usual. She sounded really exhausted, and I wanted to feed her dinner, rub her shoulders and help her relax. I canceled the Earl Grey shower program so I could hear her better, even though I hadn’t rinsed out all my conditioner.
“Were you in the shower?”
“I was,” I said. “That is, I am. Just finishing up.”
“Wish I could be in there with you.”
She said the words, but without her usual upbeat, teasing manner.
“How are you doing?” I said.
“I’m tired. But happy.”
“Did things go well with your project?”
“Yeah,” she said. All her words stretched out longer than usual. “We ran the simulations hundreds of times faster than real time to cover months instead of hours, and none of the revised composite artificial intelligence systems went crazy.”
“That’s great!” I said. “Way to go.”
“Thanks,” said Poly. “It’s going to take hours more for us to revise our paper.”
“Are you still at the lab? You’re not planning to stay up and make the revisions now, are you?”
“No, Professor Urrrson’s mate dropped me off at my apartment. She saw how tired I was and wanted to make sure I got home safely.”
“Smart Tigrammath,” I said.
“You know it,” said Poly. “She’s a professor at Emory. I don’t think she trusted me, or Professor Urrrson, to give an autocab the right address.”
“Was she right about that?”
“Probably,” Poly yawned. “I was glad to have a ride, anyway.”
“Would you like me to come over and bring you dinner?”
“Ummmm,” she said. “That would be lovely, but…”
“But?”
“But I’d be asleep before you could get here. I’m barely conscious as it is. I’m flat on my back in bed and only propping my eyelids open long enough to call you.”
“Have you had anything to eat?”
“You’re sweet,” said Poly. “Professor Urrrson’s mate brought us an amazing breakfast and we ordered Chinese for a late lunch. I don’t need food, I need sleep.”
“Okay,” I said. “Take good care of yourself and know I’m thinking about you.”
“You’re sweet,” Poly repeated, in a groggy haze. “And thanks again for meeting my family’s flights.”
That was only the fourth time she’d reminded me.
“I will,” I said, with a smile in my voice.
“And Lover Boy,” she said, clearly fading.
I was all ears.
“Uh huh?”
“Watch out for…”
But she was out.
Watch out for what?
I sure hoped Poly would be able to fill me in before I left for the airport.
* * * * *
I got back in the shower and finished getting conditioner out of my hair and soap out of all those hard to reach places. Then I got dressed, wearing jeans, my Orishen pupa silk shirt—Poly insisted I wear it all the time—and a GalCon Systems t-shirt, instead of my standard corporate uniform of khakis and an XSC polo. I felt like a new man, ready to wrestle ten times my weight in Short Pâkk warriors. I’d lose, but I was ready.
If Poly wouldn’t be over tonight, I was free to do some digging into O’Sullivan Fabrication. I moved to the living room and pulled up a satellite mapping program on my wall screen. Planet Earth hung in space and revolved, slowly. It was a real time image from slightly below geosynchronous orbit. My phone provided voice navigation, so I asked it to play tour guide.
“Zoom in and show me an overhead view of the O’Sullivan operation,” I said.
“Zooming in, you’ve got it,” said my phone with an odd tone.
The screen went black. I could make out individual dark-colored pebbles embedded in the O’Sullivan Fabrication building’s roof.
“Don’t be a jerk,” I said to my phone. “Pull back a little.”
“Yes, boss,” it said, quickly switching to obsequious from overly literal.
Or maybe not. The view on my wall screen expanded as if the camera was attached to a high speed elevator on one of Arthur C. Clarke’s beanstalks. Instead of the thousand-foot view I’d been hoping to see, I was at fifteen thousand feet. A bend in the Chattahoochee River and the straight east-west line of I-20 were two major landmarks. I could see the twisting, turning steel of the roller coasters at Six Flags Over Georgia and dozens of large, rectangular buildings with black roofs spread out across green countryside filled with grass and trees. Other roads crisscrossed the landscape, linking the structures. Some were four lane, some were two lane, and a few were only a single lane wide. From the air the landscape looked like an old fashioned printed circuit board, with the buildings standing in for soldered-on memory, graphics chips, and CPUs.
I remembered that the area near Six Flags had been one of the top spots in Georgia to locate data centers before First Contact. The area had inexpensive land, was served by multiple power providers, and was located near major telecommunications interconnection points that could link servers to anywhere on the net in only a few hops. The congruent technology revolution had negated every one of the area’s benefits, except for cheap land. Power hungry data centers now had unlimited energy and every server was only one hop away from any other with congruent wormhole-based communications.
I’d had to troubleshoot some data security issues with off-planet links for a client out there last year. I drove by windowless one story concrete building after windowless one story concrete building on the way. They were all corporate data centers and each one had understated signage, except for Google. They had three locations in a row with their logo in letters six feet tall in front of twelve-foot razor wire-topped fences. Some companies are really serious about their physical security.
Protecting I.T. assets has become a lot more challenging since First Contact. It’s not easy to defend against black hat hackers who can teleport. That’s why many modern data centers have high-speed rotating tranquilizer dart guns mounted on their ceilings. One of my clients was so paranoid that she insisted I install… wait, I’m not allowed to even think about that. I signed a non-disclosure. Just know that anyone teleporting into one of her corporate data centers wouldn’t be a happy camper.
“Please give me a one thousand-foot view centered above O’Sullivan Fabrication’s operations,” I said, trying to be ultra-precise.
My phone didn’t say anything, but made it happen without any backchat. What had gotten under its charging plate, I wondered?
O’Sullivan Fabrication’s production facility was a behemoth among giants. It was three stories tall and easily twice the size of Zwilniki’s enormous hangar where we’d stored “my” robot temporarily. The building was big enough to hold four or five robots like the one the octovacs assembled yesterday, along with a Dauushan Model-43 3D printer and storage for enough feed stock to choke a Tōdon. To my surprise, it was surrounded by not one, but two high fences topped with razor wire, with a dozen feet of empty ground between them. I spotted guard towers on the corners as well. It looked more like a maximum security prison than a fabrication company.
I reached over and grabbed my backpack tool bag from its spot on the table next to my front door and pulled out Chit’s bottle.
“Hey, little buddy—want to do some exploring?”
“Whazzup?” said Chit, rubbing a compound eye with a foreleg. Had she been asleep? “Explorin’ what?”
“A villain’s secret manufacturing plant.”
“Did that last time,” Chit said. “Scared some blasted grackles.”
I filled Chit in on the details. She hadn’t heard anything I’d learned during my Remot
e Hands session because my VR helmet had headphones. I could see her getting excited about a possible new adventure, or maybe there just wasn’t anything good on TV.
“Double rows of razor wire fences, guard towers, an’ who knows what else,” said Chit. “Sounds like a challenge. When d’ we start?”
“Right after dinner,” I said. “I want to wait for traffic to die down.”
“Somebody may die down,” said my friend, shaking her head, “and I don’t want it t’ be me.”
“I thought you were an expert at reconnaissance.”
“Expert enough to know when it ain’t smart to try breakin’ into certain places.”
“Come with me and scope it out?”
“Take me to the Buckhead Diner for dinner and you’re on,” said Chit. “I could really get into some of their mashed potatoes.”
“You did that last time we were there and it took me over an hour to get all the starch off your antennae,” I said.
“Details, details,” said Chit.
“Okay,” I said, “You’re on.”
* * * * *
Chit was content to nibble on my mashed potatoes, though she did threaten to do the backstroke in the gravy bowl to disconcert the servers. While we ate I had my phone do an Internet search for anything it could find about O’Sullivan Fabrication. I didn’t check my phone at the dinner table, since I’d had good manners drilled into me and knew not to check my phone while dining at any establishment with cloth napkins. After some excellent meatloaf, the aforementioned mashed potatoes, and southern-style haricots vert et jambon, that’s green beans and ham, we left the restaurant and I walked to my van. Chit rode on my shoulder and tried to look unobtrusive.
Once we buckled up and were moving, it was time for my phone to tell us what it had learned. The vehicle’s windshield turned into a screen and a corporate promotional video started to play. Images of giant trucks with tires taller than a Tigrammath, bulldozers sized to herd Dauushans, and cranes tall enough pluck Quirinx fliers from their cliff-top aeries panned across our vision as a voice-over spokesman made his pitch.
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