“Before you say anything-”
“Ain’t you pretty!”
“Never mind.”
“So benevolent. So constipated.”
Paul fished out a transparent laminate and moved to a clear security door by the main entrance. “It wasn’t my idea. I just turned up for the shoot.”
“What is it you do here again?”
Paul swiped his card. Nothing happened. He swore softly, repositioned it, tried again. This time the card swipe was rewarded with one of the most satisfying clicks Jack had heard. The brushed-steel frame nudged open. Paul sighed with relief.
“Project coordinator,” Paul replied. “They recruited me out of college. I make sure things get done, effectively, on time, and in a way that gets people excited.” He held the door open. “After you.” The interior of the glassed atrium was warm, containing three stories of extravagantly empty space. “The dome is a double layer of 3-D-printed textured polycarbonate and reinforced glass. The air layer provides insulation. Depending on the position of the sun, the shadows cast by the canopy’s asymmetrical architecture take on different aspects: striations, crazed glass, shapes significant to people who know more about math than I do.”
“Neat trick.”
“On top of that they’ve got the glass doubling as solar panels, providing a marginally positive carbon footprint. For the administrative sections of the building at least. Some parts of the labs chew power like a motherfucker.”
Paul marched left toward the façade of one of the campus’s original brick buildings, now contained within the expensive geometric umbrella of the Quantum Physics Building’s dome.
“The architect spends every alternate month under a Shinto vow of non-communication in a compound outside Hokkaido. It made negotiations and milestones a total bitch. Dunno why they gave him that prize; it’ll only encourage him.” Paul glanced back the way they came. “Follow me, I’ll take you upstairs.”
Jack glanced back. “Are we allowed in here?” No sign of the guard, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting for backup. “You’re not acting like we’re allowed to be here. Buildings this expensive usually have doors that work the first time.”
“Whose face is on that screen?”
“I don’t know, but he’s smiling like there’s a gun to his head.”
A hazard-striped security door opened onto a freight elevator, which was set into the façade of the old building. Paul waved his card through a scanner. “You’ve seen a lot of weirdness, yeah?” Paul wasn’t shooting the shit: he was double-checking.
A fifteen-inch screen on the elevator’s opposite wall flashed to life and provided a rundown of Paul’s appointments: none. It advised that he was five hours early for work and that Monarch Innovations does not approve of more than 10 percent employee overtime in a given month. An MIT-sourced graph appeared to support this philosophy, and the screen wished him a good morning.
“I have now,” Jack said.
Paul swiped the card again, tapped the top floor. Jack noticed the tension in his face.
“Hit me with the weirdest,” Paul said.
“So I was in Belize. That’s in South America.”
“I know where Belize is, Jack.”
“So I was in Belize and made friends with two lady pimps when I helped them save a horse from being beaten to death by some scumbag who owned a racetrack.”
“That’s-”
“The next morning I officiated when they fought an early-morning duel over the beautiful prostitute they had both fallen in love with.”
Paul eyeballed him.
“2011. Straight-up code duello.”
Paul considered. “How did it end?”
“Marriage. All three of them, quite happily.”
“Huh.”
“Life’s short. So, does that qualify?”
“Not even close. This is our floor.”
The doors shushed open onto a long, dark corridor. A single door was rim-lit at the end.
“This doesn’t feel like it fits inside that old building.”
“We added a couple of reinforced top floors to suit our needs. We’re above the canopy at this level.” Recess lighting kicked in at ankle height, following them toward the door. “Once we get inside I’ll need your help to set a few things up. How familiar are you with the theory of relativity?”
“I’m relatively familiar.”
“You still like sci-fi?”
“We prefer ‘speculative fiction.’”
“Well, I’d say you’re about to step into it.” Clinically white armored doors rumbled open at the final swipe. “Except this is anything but speculative.” Paul walked into darkness. Jack followed.
Lights clicked and thudded, revealing the chamber section by section.
Vertigo kicked in, Jack’s hands closing on the cold steel of the safety rail before him. He was looking down into an octagonal tech pit, NASA-white and hairy with red and blue cables snaking out of discrete access panels. Suspended at the center of the hollowed-out geometric sphere of a room was… another geometric sphere. Held atop a high-tech dais, the sphere was made of a dense-looking dull metal, each face of it jacked and wired with tons of heavy-gauge cabling. The cabling poured from the sphere and down into subfloor cavities, or was draped over and connected to a metal walkway that ringed the sphere. Jack might have thought the walkway might be for maintenance, if it wasn’t for the sealed-off airlock chamber sitting out of place on their side of it.
Paul didn’t waste time. After swipe-locking the door behind them, he leapt down the steps to the left and headed around the octagonal pit toward a glassed-in observation room.
“How much money did they give you? What am I even looking at?”
The in-room intercom piped Paul’s voice from four corners, weird acoustics making him sound like two people at once. He spoke absentmindedly, working a two-screen control panel.
“The beginning of a new age.” He stopped abruptly, clattering keys falling silent. When he spoke again his voice was flat with realization. “You’re looking at the death of regret.” He smiled. “Huh.”
Jack studied the construction, trying to make sense of it, and failing.
“Where have I seen this before?”
“Nowhere,” Paul said, busy with the monitors. “It’s proprietary.”
Something was off about this. “Paul, are you bullshitting me? This isn’t ‘proprietary.’” Jack pointed out the viewplate. “Tell me that thing isn’t based on Will’s work.”
Paul stopped what he was doing, formed a response, opened his mouth, changed his mind, shut it again. “Okay,” he said, and went back to his keyboard. “I won’t.”
“That security guard told me Will used to work here.” Paul was the only person on Earth Jack trusted. If there was deception here, he would not be able to withstand it.
“I know you hate being lied to,” Paul said, reading his mind. “But I would point out that I didn’t lie to you; I just didn’t answer your question in a timely manner. So… we cool?”
“Why am I here?”
“I delayed explanations until you saw the Promenade for yourself. You have to understand everything in its proper context.”
“Don’t give me long answers to simple questions, Paul. What did Will do and how bad is it?” Paul was still tapping keys, dragging a finger across viewscreens. It didn’t look like he was getting anywhere. It kept reprimanding with error messages. “What are you doing? Do you even know what you’re doing?”
“Yes,” Paul said, exasperated, and produced a collection of Post-it notes from his pocket. Waved them as evidence. “I know what I’m doing.” The viewscreen barped again. “I’m just,” Paul said, calmly, “trying to work. Quickly. Because in less than five minutes your security guard buddy is going to come through that door with at least three friends and change the course of human progress forever.” Paul returned to what he was doing. “For the worse, just so we’re clear.”