Tommie pointed his laptop so its camera could see the lettering. "I have to admit, this fiber link is handy. I can send video out to my consultancy." Invisible to Tommie, the Mysterious Stranger jerked a thumb at itself and grinned. Tommie studied his laptop's display for a moment. "Yes! We have reached the GenGen optical crossbar." He pointed down the side tunnel. "This is where things get tricky."
Within fifty feet, the side tunnel had opened into something wider… something cavernous. In the shadows, something slanted into the heights. "See that tower?" said Tommie. "That's GenGen's private launcher. These guys don't bother with the launchers in East County."
The clickety sound was all around them now. It came from the tops of equipment cabinets; it had a pattern, like poetry scanned purely for stress. At the end of a stanza, things actually moved . Light glittered from deep within matted crystals. Some of the cabinets had a physical labeclass="underline"
Mus MCog.
The Stranger danced among them, a fantasy from Tommie's laptop and the fiber behind them. But the fantasy was watching through the laptop's camera, and talking — at least to Robert. The Stranger pointed in the general direction of the crystals. "The wonders of nano-fluidics. A decade of old-time bioscience done in every shifting of the lights. How do you represent a trillion samples, and a billion trillion analyses? How can art deal with that?" It hesitated as if truly anxious for an answer, and then it was gone again. But it left behind its own labels and explanations.
Robert looked at the ranks of machines, the tower almost lost in the distant dark. The place was a machine cathedral. But how to represent it, when it would take him years to have even shallow understanding? The massed crystal was not spectacularly colored; most of the fluid paths were microscopic and hidden within appliances that might have been oversized refrigerators. The Stranger's labels floated randomly about, ghostly subtitles to some transcendent process. And yet, it almost made him remember what he had lost; words burbled up within his imagination, words striving to capture the awe he felt.
They walked down the narrow aisles, turning only when Tommie told them to turn. Every minute or so, he would stop their progress and grab a few more gadgets from the backpacks.
"We gotta install these just right, guys. Staying invisible here is a lot harder than in the tunnel." Tommie wanted the gadgets set near comm nodes, which turned out to be way back within the fluidics crystals. Robert did most of the "installing." Carlos would boost him up over the top of the cabinet. Robert would wiggle back, so near the glassworks that he could hear tiny, tiny clicks and the fluid hissing so faintly it might have been seepage. In their millions, those sounds added up to the larger atmosphere of the room.
In one case, Robert lingered, and noticed that the gadget itself took care of final installation, sliding away from him, deeper into the glassworks — as if its underside were a miniature transport tray .
"What are you laughing at, Gu?" Blount's voice came from below.
"Nothing!" Robert crawled off the cabinet and dropped to the floor. "I just figured out a little mystery."
They continued on. Most of the cabinets were labeled Dros MCog now. They were making faster progress, mainly because Carlos and Robert had figured out the gymnastics of the operation.
"That's the last of them, guys!" Tommie's gaze shifted from his laptop to the fluidics crystals. "You know, it's really weird that all the node locations were so deep in the lab equipment," he said.
The Mysterious Stranger slipped in front of Tommie and waggled greenish fingers at Robert and Carlos and Winnie Blount. "That's not a mystery to follow up on. Why doesn't someone suggest that we get on with Tommie's great plan, eh?"
No one said anything for a moment, but Robert guessed two things about what they had just done: It was what they had really come here for. It was how the Stranger might make good on his promises. Maybe Carlos and Winnie realized something similar, because suddenly all of them were talking. Blount waved the others silent and turned to Parker. "Who knows, Tommie? You said this was subtle. It might take weeks to figure out just how everything fits together."
"Yup, yup," Tommie nodded, oblivious of the Stranger's satisfied look. "Time for analysis later!" He glanced down at his laptop. "In any case this was the hard part. Now we have a clear run to where Huertas stores the shredda."
They didn't set down any more gadgets. Tommie's laptop advised speed, and therefore so did Tommie. Whatever the Mysterious Stranger planned for GenGen no longer needed them. Robert glanced back. Winnie was out of breath, almost trotting. The Stranger must have given him some special encouragement. And behind Carlos, Tommie spun his prayer wheel, drifting the spider thread out behind them.
Suddenly the concrete floor gave way to something that bounced back against their feet. And the sound of their steps was like tapping on a vast and tightly fitted drum.
"When does a tunnel fly?" said Tommie. "When it's really a tunnel in the sky!" And suddenly, Robert realized where they were. This was one of the enclosed walkways that came off the side of Rose Canyon, just north of campus. Right now they were standing in a tube seventy feet above the brush– and manzanita-covered hillside.
Then they were back on concrete. Ahead was another cavern, and this one was almost empty. Huertas country.
Miri ran, but a spotlight followed. No, that was just normal tunnel lighting. She slowed, stopped, slid up against the wall… and looked back. No human followed. The entrance hole was the only other light, and now it was some distance behind her. Juan !
She watched it and listened. If no one was coming after her, that might mean that UCSD security was still working down here.
She tried to probe the walls. She called 911. Again. Nothing. Maybe the Badguy had permanently zapped her Epiphany. She shrugged up some test routines. No, it wasn't dead. She could see her files, but every local node was ignoring her. Then she noticed the pink flicker at the edge of the diagnostic, a wireless response that her Epiphany would normally have discarded as too distant, too erratic. A second passed, heaven knew how many retries, and she got an ID. It was Juan, his wearable.
Miri — > Juan: <sm>Please answer! </sm>
No reply came back, and she couldn't check his medicals without more access rights. Abruptly Juan's light flared, died. Miri sucked in a breath. Mr. Janitor/Professor was still up there. He had whacked poor Juan again. No, be precise: He had whacked Juan's gear again, maybe just to prevent Miri from forwarding out through it. For a moment, Miri drew in on herself. It was not a good thing that all her planning and leadership could come to this. Alice never seemed to have these problems. She always knew what to do next. Bob… sometimes Bob made mistakes. He was the one who always seemed uneasy about certainty. I wonder what Bob would think of all this ?… I wonder what Juan would do ?
Miri looked down the tunnel, away from the entrance. It was dark, but it wasn't perfectly quiet. There might be voices, chatting conversationally, never quite making words. Robert and his library friends were down here, surely being run as cat's-paws by Mr. Janitor/Professor. How can I wreck his plan ? Miri got to her feet and ran quietly up the tunnel, still trapped in her own private pool of light. No sign of Robert, and none of the mumbled voices sounded quite right. She passed occasional cross tunnels. Small things whizzed down transparent tubes.
Some minutes later, and still no sign of Robert.
Miri read as she ran along; she had cached plenty about UCSD and the biotechs. There was proprietary and security stuff she couldn't know, but… the cross tunnels led off to particular labs. Three hundred acres in seventeen separate chambers!