Finally, the first day on the job came and life was looking up. Actually the entire day was kind of hectic since I had to deal with security, social security, human resources, and I had to go through a new employee orientation, all of which took until well after lunch. The lady at the security desk took a decent badge image of me I thought. I was sportin' my new student-loan-purchased wardrobe and haircut. Of course, I got soaked by an afternoon post-Rain thunderstorm while trying to figure out how to put the security decal on the window of the classic Cutlass. That was just a minor incident. Then I spent a few minutes driving around the base looking for the Space Vehicles Directorate Building. So, I didn't actually get to my new office (get that—I actually have an office) until nearly three o'clock in the afternoon. I had just enough time to meet my boss's boss, the secretary, Alice, a few of the other employees of the Innovative Concepts Group, or ICG as they called it, and to find where they hid pens and paper before it was time to go home. I didn't even get started on things like email, software, where the printers are, and where the closest bathrooms to my office are. But in time I would settle in and be much happier than at VR's.
That night after my first day on the job Lazarus and I celebrated and then I cried for hours. I know I was sad from losing . . . everyone I had ever known in an instant, but that had been nearly three years ago and I was getting back on my feet. I shouldn't have been so bipolar for so long, should I? The drugs were not helping. My plan was to see a new doctor as soon as my insurance with the Air Force kicked in. I already had scheduled an appointment.
CHAPTER 4
The following few days I got settled in and filled out the SF-86 security form. That thing is electronic and asked for details about my past, which had been wiped from existence by The Rain. I asked Larry (no longer "Mr. Waterford," he said) about how it would be determined if I really ever existed or not since records and witnesses to my life had all been destroyed.
"Just fill out the forms and let Defense Security Services handle the rest," he told me. "They have had these difficulties since the meteors and have found ways to get information. Also, since The Rain, as you call it, they increased the requirements for polygraphs. Expect to take a lie detector test sometime in the next few weeks."
So that was that. I was on my way to a new career, with a security clearance, even. I was put in for a Top Secret and was told to read all the documents on the so-called AFSPSEC website. I found out the acronym stands for Air Force Special Programs Security Education Community. I was also told I should look up the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual, the Director of Central Intelligence Directives, and a few other security documents that read like stereo instructions.
Finally, on my second Monday, I was set up with a workbench in a lab space and actually given a technical task to do. Larry brought me what appeared to be a small motherboard in a plastic static bag (and by small I mean about twice the size of a sticky-note) and told me to figure out what it was.
"Do you have any information on it?" I asked him.
"Sure I do. But I want to see what you come up with first." He smirked.
"When do you need this figured out? I mean how long do I have to tinker with it?"
"Take as long as you need," he said smugly. "But, uh, don't take too long." And he left it at that. How damned vague could you be?
How long was "too long" and how long was "as long as I needed"? This was some sort of test for the new guy I figured. So, I sat there for twenty minutes or more just rolling the thing over in my hands and looking at it before I came up with a plan of action. Since it was pushing four-thirty p.m., my plan of action was to go home and take Lazarus for a walk, which is just what I did.
The next morning I had a doctor's appointment with my new headshrinker. After talking with her for some time, she decided that I had developed a tolerance to the Zoloft and wanted me to try a new drug, I couldn't pronounce or spell the name, which was just out on the market. Fortunately, she had plenty samples of the drug and gave me a handful of them, since they were apparently expensive as hell. I had decent insurance now, but the deductible on brand name drugs was two hundred and fifty bucks and I sure didn't want to have to pay that.
So, I took one of the pills with lunch and headed into the base for work. That little motherboard was still sitting on my desk in the plastic baggy.
"Well, first things first," I told myself and carefully pulled the board out of the baggy. Then I took out my lab notebook and began making a diagram of the circuit. It took about three hours to get what I thought was a complete diagram for the thing drawn and each part that I could identify labeled. Then I tried to develop a block diagram of the circuit with the nonlabeled chips marked A through D; the rest of the components on the board were standard parts.
It was my guess that the board was a "onesy" and had possibly come from a multi-card chassis. My reasoning for that conclusion was that all of the leads were covered and as short as possible, and there were outlines in each corner of the board for some sort of mounting hardware. The short leads would help prevent interference to and from other boards mounted above and below (or beside) it in the chassis. From this assumption I drew a dotted line around my evolving block diagram to represent a chassis.
The block diagram consisted of all five "main" chips, A through E, represented as blocks of size proportional to those on the board. From the top left of the page there was a chip about an inch square, which appeared to be some sort of standard input/output (I/O) conversion chip (analog to digital/digital to analog). To the right of the I/O chip was a chip much larger, about one and a half inches across and three inches tall. I had no clue what that chip would do, but it looked similar to a main processor chip like a Pentium VI. I labeled it A.
To the right of chip A was a slightly smaller chip, about one inch square, and I labeled it B. To the right of chip B was an identical twin to chip A, which I labeled C. To the right of chip C was another I/O chip. The chip sequence I/O, A, B, C, I/O made up the top row of my block diagram. Also, all of the chips on this row were connected by a copper stripe on the circuit board. The I/O chips had what appeared to be standard serial outputs connected to them.
With the top line of the block diagram completed I then added chip D directly below chip B and then chip E directly below chip D. Chip D had copper leads to both chips A and C. There were also fiber optic cables connecting chips A to B, B to C, D to A, D to C, and E to D. Below and on each side of chip E there was a small power processing unit (PPU) board just like the type in a game console power supply unit (PSU). Each of these PPUs was in turn connected to a single transformer and fuse box that had a standard power cable input. There were also power connections between several pins on each of the chips and the PPUs and other standard components on the board. It looked to me as though there were two separate PPUs because the board was actually two systems in one. Perhaps the two identical processor-looking chips were parallel processors on a single board, or maybe one was a backup to the other. I didn't know.
By the time I had figured out the rough block diagram, it was six-thirty. I just knew Lazarus was going to kill me since I was late for his evening walk. I packed up my things, put the board in my bag, along with my notes, and headed out for the evening. There couldn't be any security risk or anything; hell, my clearance hadn't come through yet. So I knew this stuff was public stuff. No problem; if it had been classified they would never have let me see it.