Chapter 1
Heavy rail stations were never my favorite. At the thickest, these lines had six parallel rails and dozens of trains riding on each, but they didn’t do much to curb the rider population that waited aimlessly at each station like poor sods at a soup kitchen, begging for a seat to ride in. Even at the death-end of the week, people packed into the stations shoulder-to-shoulder to get to an early Monday stroll downtown.
I was fortunate. I could avoid the sardine cans they repurposed as “trains” since I got to ride on the N-Freights, the royal crown jewels of the rail system. Oh sure, they were the exact same, smelly rides as the rest of them, but it was the pride that mattered. Being able to actually sit down once in every while also helped.
SX14 rolled in on time, as she always does. The paint on her hull was flaking like sunburned skin and numerous scratches and pockmarks marred her sides, and she seemed quaint compared to the newer, faster, and sexier trains that ran alongside her. You know, those haughty high-maintenance numbers that were always going out of service due to loose mag-coils or crashed operating systems or some other sort of hissy fit.
As SX14 pulled up to the station, passengers began stepping forward on the platform and waited for the train to release her doors. The automated doors hissed and creaked open, spreading the train’s treasures for all to abuse, but a door on the second car opened a crack and then hesitated and became shy. A would-be passenger in front of the line wiggled his hands through the crack and encouraged the door’s confidence by peeling it open.
While I waited for the column of passengers to stream inside, three golden triangles animated themselves on the train’s digital skin, coming together and interlocking like molecules. The form would dance for a bit to catch attention and then explode before repeating all over again. On the train’s fore, an identical, but stationary, emblem branded her to the owning company and forever enslaved her to shuttle corporate drones until her dying days at the scrap heap.
Tetra Chromatics Corporation. International. The train’s synthesized announcement reminded us when we entered, just in case we forgot. I suppose it was a necessary convention; the yellow triangles bred so unchecked in the wild that their population overwhelmed the senses and, ironically, became invisible. Take this very train, for instance. Look close and you could discover the homes of many triangles here: the maglev systems, the logic control systems, the handlebars for poor late saps, the interior lights, the safety control systems, the transparent window-displays that blocked the view outside with company propaganda and advertisements, the hardened exterior sheet panels, the exterior lights, the friendly-but-not-too-comfy seat cushions, the communications control, the power systems, the lavatory seats, and thousands of miscellaneous knick-knacks you could buy for two dollars a bag. Even the operating system probably had those triangles buried somewhere deep inside its code, a set of three-dimensional tetrahedronal glories to be unearthed by systems engineers. You could find them everywhere if you un-blinded yourself to the ubiquity of the company’s geometry. The thing was, the company would rather you not see those triangles, but to instead sear them on the back wastelands of your mind like hypnotic voodoo.
Those large, gilded triangles that mated majestically on SX14’s head, however, signified ownership, not craft. Tetra didn’t make trains.
The gentleman that sat next to me was reading the morning news on his late-model computer tablet, the pricey kind that had the logic systems etched directly onto a substrate on the flexible screen (the exact kind of substrate Tetra manufactures in its chemicals division, as it happened). By the designer watch he wore, the guy was one of the uppity up managerial types. It had a platinum band, and all sorts of exotic materials peppered its face, invisible except under squinting. A tiny triplet of golden triangles (here, made of actual gold) were important enough to replace the twelve. When your money-grubbing multinational was big enough for some hoity-toity schmuck in Sweden to design a fancy watch for you—pardon, “timepiece”—then you knew you were working for something special.
I didn’t speak to him or anyone else during the ride. I just sat alongside my like-minded colleagues, watching the talking visage of our CEO on the windows. As the window-displays superimposed his head against the outside, he seemed to swallow the distant skyscrapers with his yapping jaws. A red tape of breaking headlines then broke out and overwrote his face in loud caps: “BREAKING NEWS: TETRA CORP. FINALIZES ACQUISITION OF INDUSTRY RIVALS CIP TECHNIC AND MASTER ELECTRONICS.” I sighed and drooped my head back to face the ceiling. Ten minutes later, the train deployed its brakes and squealed to a stop.
“Welcome to Tetra Chromatics Corporation’s Summit campus,” the announcement squeaked.
A concrete courtyard revealed itself past Summit’s North Station. It stretched to the horizon without purpose and yielded to a looming mass of metal that seemed to jut out from the ground like a deranged mountain. A monument of iridescent glass and steel, the Spire building was an idol to the tenets of engineering. Transparent panels wrapped over the structural alloys and snuck around various geometries jutting out on rows of ledges. Gargoyles were too gothic for high-tech buildings, so they used tetrahedrons instead. Through the outer skin of windows, you could see the underlying arches and indeterminate figures struggling in the lobby as if trying to free themselves from imprisonment. Like all the other elements of the building, they always lost to the overbearing architecture.
I use the term “architecture” rather loosely. Summit’s Spire was an example of a building that was imagined, designed, and bred by engineers and for engineers. I’m sure that no self-respecting architect with any artistic standard could have ever borne such a creation. It’s true that it was probably the finest example of craftsmanship in the entire city. It sure was a beast of a building. But it wasn’t elegant. It was all math and no art.
Most of the research and development took place in facilities just off the Spire. Chemicals were to the west, biotech was east, and mechanical engineering was south. Subdivisions such as robotics and microbiology scattered around the parent facilities like electrons to a nucleus. The Spire itself only held administration and other bureaucrats, since only they were important enough to work inside Tetra’s great dong. For all the years I worked at the campus, I’ve never actually seen the entire place beyond the Spire and the southern facilities. Didn’t have to and didn’t ever care to want to.
“Good morning, Summit. The time is eight-thirty. Welcome to a new day of productivity and excellence,” announced the computerized PA system. Her voice echoed alongside countless others of all pitches and tones in the lobby. In turn, hundreds of footsteps, magnified by the marble floors, drowned the voices. The melee reduced the rest of the pronouncements from the PA to squawks—a loss of no real consequence other than missing her warm voice of condensed milk. I knew I had finally reached the upper echelons of the corporate drone when I often found myself unable to sleep at night because my place didn’t possess the same cacophony of Summit’s floors. That’s when your friendly neighborhood sleep medications came to save the night.
Tetra’s Summit. One of the largest and most prestigious corporate research and development facilities in the world. Only the best and brightest could find the honor of working here. At least, that’s what America Today told me. The media wouldn’t lie, right?
I was late that day. SX14 was on time all right, but I actually caught her second trip to Summit. Normally, punctuality was a virtue I always tried to strive for. I was mostly successful. Mostly. The problem with punctuality is that it’s just too strict. It never allows for any excuse for any reason. Punctuality never recognizes flus, accidents, funerals, diarrhea, Ebola, or in my case that day, a lack of mouthwash.
Mouthwash was one of the few things I took straight to my heart. Throughout my time here on Earth, I took many of life’s miseries in stride. After all, what’s life without some suffering? There wouldn’t be any drama, and that would be boring. However, I made an exception for my breath. I had to buy a bottle of elixir that morning after discovering, to my horror, that I had run out. I made an emergency detour to a local thrift shop before I got to the train, but by then it had already left. A small price to pay. The ceremony of cleansing my mouth of evil was an invocation I had never broken, lest the Elder Gods of Bodily Odors be offended. Punctuality be damned.
I ducked down and tried to sneak past the round reception desk at the center of the lobby, hoping to remain unnoticed by the creature inhabiting it. My stealth skills were pitiful that morning.
“Good morning, Mr. Ivano,” a pleasant voice echoed. It stopped me in mid-step. “Did you sleep well today?”
I hesitated and then stood to meet its owner. I was greeted by a gentle smile and a stern face. I straightened up my clothes.
“Yeah. I slept great, Aimee.”
Aimee gave me another smile while frowning at me. The paradox of emotions was an ability unique to robots, I’ve found. Not too long ago, Tetra had purchased for Summit’s receptionist a “soft-metal” facial detailing system to enhance her ability to interact with guests. The package came with a suite of human-like expressions and responses executed with mechanical precision. These companies commissioned years of anthropological studies and spent millions in R&D to create these human-robot interaction systems, and the mechanics were technically flawless. But no amount of money could hide that those smiles were covering silver metal and gray polymers.
“That is very good, Mr. Ivano,” Aimee said, her voice a calculated mix of honey and gasoline. She narrowed her indigo oculars at me. “Secondary Engineering shifts started twenty-seven minutes ago. You are late today.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Would you like to tell me why, Mr. Ivano?”
“Mouthwash.”
“Please elaborate.”
“I mean I ran out. You always need to wash your mouth.”
“I do not believe that an unpleasant breath is an acceptable rationale for tardiness, Mr. Ivano.” She placed her hands on the desk and toned her voice lower, which only made the contradiction with her smile even more absurd. “It is certainly not something one should risk his career over. I would say that even you would know better.”
She then swallowed that mimicry of a human smile with metallic dispassion. I didn’t pay any mind to it. Aimee had worn her “smile-and-antagonize” gambit well these days. I shook my head and wove my voice with forged indignation to counteract it.
“Do you know how big a deal bad breath is, Aimee? It’s the cause of almost all of human conflict. Truly horrific stuff. What do you know of bad breath, anyway?” I leaned over and tapped the back of her hand. “It’s not like you would know anything about the human condition, right? You oversized, expensive toaster.”
“I beg your pardon Mr. Ivano, but I do not believe—”
“Sure you don’t, dear. You pretend to, but you don’t believe anything. Let’s keep matters of humanity and its bad breath to us humies, eh? That keeps things civilized.”
She formed her mechanical brows into a frown and her electronics seemed to buzz in thought. “Well. I suppose so, Mr. Ivano,” she said after some reflection. “I was unaware this was such a serious human matter. I apologize for antagonizing you.”
Her smile materialized once again without a hint of wear.
Happy I had weaseled my way to victory, I smiled, tapped her hand again, and continued on my way. I was almost at the mechanical engineering security checkpoint when I picked out her voice through the crowd: “But I still must inform human resources of your late arrival.” With one foot on the ground in mid-walk, I twisted an about-face and ran back to the desk, where the receptionist was now occupying herself with a computer tablet.
“Come on, Aimee! If HR finds out, then they’re gonna tell payroll, and then those assholes will dock half my pay for the day. Please don’t tell them.”
She shook her head while still examining the tablet. “I am sorry, but rules are rules. It is part of our Human Efficiency Initiative.”
“Aw, come on Aimee! I have mouths to feed. Help a guy out, won’t you?”
She looked up to me. “I know that you have no spouse nor do you have any dependents, Mr. Ivano.”
“Of course I have dependents. I have a fish.” Well not really, but she surely wouldn’t have believed I owned anything more advanced. “He’s a voracious bastard. I won’t be able to feed him and he’ll starve!”
“I am sure your fish will be able to cope.”
“It’s a big one. Eats a whole bunch.”
“I have a contact for a discount marine supply shop, if you wish it.”
Somewhat desperate, I played a final card. “Okay, if you don’t tell HR, then—” I paused to bring out my best debonair voice, which fooled no one. “I’ll take you out. Dinner. Just the two of us. Best night of your life.”
I took Aimee’s chrome-polished hand and pressed its back with a chivalrous kiss. She just smiled and politely withdrew her hand.
“I am sorry Mr. Ivano. But not only is bribery unethical, it is also quite illegal.”
Defeated, I threw my hands in the air and bowed my head down. I peeked up in reverence. “Well, could we still go out for dinner anyway? Because a robot woman would be the only thing that would be into me after I go bankrupt from having a cut in my pay.”
She chuckled and stood to push me toward the labs. Her hands rested on her silvery hips as she tilted her head in mock disapproval. I grinned and let her take this victory for the day. There will always be more tomorrow.
Past the checkpoint and in the circular hallway that joined the engineering labs, small groups of Primary engineers were mingling and exchanging small talk underneath the echoes of the announcements, which still hadn’t exhausted its bank of corporate vomit. They paid only a glance as I politely made my way past. It was sophisticated conversation, business and politics and all that other grown-up stuff.
“You think they might just dismantle CIP and Master?” one red-tied engineer said. “I mean, we don’t need CIP’s fabs and Master hasn’t made anything worthwhile in years.”
“Nah,” his blue-tied colleague replied. “We didn’t buy them out just to shut them down. Who cares about them, anyway? They’re just two lines to a bigger fish.”
“Kanid Tech?”
“Bingo. Whom does Kanid contract to build their products? CIP. Who is their major supplier in electronic resources? Master.” He slapped his palms together. “This is just a step to shut Kanid down for good.”
Red tie-er chuckled. “And all because it was too stubborn to get bought out like good boys and girls. Sucks to be them.”
“I dunno. Justice Department’s been getting a little hairy about that deal, anyway. Goddamn anti-trust laws. Better to just take Kanid out and put it out of its misery, I say.”
“Maybe we should just sell CIP and Master’s assets and buy more lobbyists.”
I shuffled by them and entered Secondary Engineering Lab 2.
Secondary Engineering was what the other engineering departments called the “grunt brigade.” Small wonder: SE was where Summit performed its “rapid procedural engagement and development.” It’s an inspiring euphemism for “grunge-work that the other engineers are paid too well to do.” This was where the unglamorous of engineering lived. Things such as endless lists of data that needed to be fed into various function machines, schematic sorting, finding all the rivets in a plate of sheet metal, “engineering emergencies” involving a damaged break room coffee maker, and so on. Secondary received table scraps that Primary didn’t want to waste time and energy to chew, where the unimportant employees could digest and regurgitate.
That’s what we Secondary engineers really were: cannon fodder in the vast engineering army. We were armed with a handful of ammunition but no gun.
Both Secondary Engineering labs had the same format. The labs had 85 personnel stations arranged in five rings, each elevated higher than the innermost, around a central loop. They surrounded and positioned toward a central “arena” that housed an Alie-Grommot Model 3 mainframe. The machine sprawled all over the area with years’ worth of cables, modules, and upgrade equipment grafted on like life support. These days, the mainframe mostly idles as a bloated retiree, cursing the world around it to die. Attached to the mainframe was a holographic projection platform that was quite useful as a snack table. The entire place evoked reminiscences of a miniaturized Coliseum, where engineering gladiators waged a spectacle for the rights of honor, glory, and the last raspberry doughnut.
Most of the techs had already begun on the day’s work queue. The constant tapping of input boards masked my entrance, and my coworkers didn’t even pay a glance when I settled into my terminal and authorized my process on the mainframe.
Rows of data and text waltzed across my terminal screen. The rhythmic tapping of keys formed a metronome to my thoughts. Things to love: flowcharts, schematics, and the rare piece of computer code. I had only started when a shout broke through and shook up the honeymoon.
“Hey! Ivan-o! Hee-yo!”
I peeked out and found the usual suspect: Mark Ellis, the lab’s foreman, calling out through cupped hands from the arena.
“Lyle!” he called again. “Hey, where have you been, you stupid son of a bitch? Back to work, I see? Thought you might’ve ate it or something!”
He ducked under a hanging data cable and climbed up the stairs to my station.
The steps seemed to cry and buckle under Mark’s righteous footsteps of masculinity. He wasn’t your fair-weather model man carrying baggages of emotions and sensitivity and all that other sort of nonsense, no sir. To Mark, a “man” was not a simple biological identification, but an honorific. His carrying cards: his spleen-shattering voice, his rugged clothes that were 90% dead animal, his female company, and a face that could not be married yet remained irresistible to kisses. He’s either a great guy to get drunk with at a bar or a ridiculous caricature, assessments that change depending on your mood. It’s not impossible to be both.
He leaned against my station’s partition in a pose familiar with male cover-shoot models.
“So what Lyle, you hate your job or something? You know what they do to laters here.”
“No, it’s fine. I got it squared away. Just have to eat half the paycheck.”
“Yeah? Who’d you sleep with to get that?”
“The receptionist.”
“That robo-chick?” He laughed and slapped his knee. “Oh, you asshole. I don’t know if that’s awesome or just plain sad.”
“A woman’s a woman, Mark. They’re all the same.”
“God’s woman is a might different than those ones from a goddamn factory, you know.”
“God created woman in order to please man. He didn’t say where she needed to come from, necessarily, so long as man is happy. Thus, they’re all the same in his eyes.”
He gave another chuckle and slapped my back, jolting my glasses off the bridge of my nose. “Lyle-boy, I like your attitude. That’s a good outlook to have.” His voice trailed off, and he began tapping the wall. “Come to think of it, that receptionist bot does sort of seem like a babe. As much a babe as a walking, talking refrigerator can be, anyway. Maybe I should check it out one of these days. Do robots even have the proper holes?”
Content I had humored him enough, I refocused back on the screen and continued working while Mark kept on his one-man conversation. Eventually, he became tired of talking and went back down to the arena, freeing me to work in peace reordering statistical data on a Shruet sprocket.
The lab’s windows polarized, to block the sun’s crankiness on its retreat underneath the earth, and eventually became opaque when the evening settled in. I finished my second work queue and prepped another set. Mark allowed me to stay for an extra shift to make up for my docked pay. By this time, only the dedicated remained, mostly young engineers or senior staff. The young techs keyed away at their pads as fresh as the morning, staying late to establish a couple new bullet points on their character references. The older ones did the same a lifetime ago, and now they used their keyboards as an elbow rest to prop their faces in their arms. The denizens of SE-2 were all alike.
Mark had shut down most of the mainframe’s processes and, appropriating the holographic platform as a dais, made pronouncements to the remaining staff of lab closing procedures and all women he was taking out for the night. He announced three girls but only called out one by name, “Candy.”
With the overhead lights dimmed and most of the staff turned in, I went out to the lobby and took a breather. Softly lit and narrow spotlights dotted the marble floor and mingled with moonlight filtering in from the skylights in a soft glow. Summit’s psychotic duality: deafening chaos in the day and introspective serenity at night. I never got used to nights at this place, confounded because it only bore such a personality at the times when it was abandoned and asleep. It was as if it was a girl who only shown her beauty when she was covered and away. Gone, empty, and unappreciated—even Aimee had shut down by this time. It’s always a surprise, and sometimes fright, when it reminded me that I was born with footsteps.
Some other late-shift employees began to leave for home. I gave a few of them a “good-bye,” but they mostly fell on deaf ears.
I stretched across a bench and took in the lullaby of Summit’s groaning bowels and the splish-splash of the water fountain along one of the lobby’s bends. It was a long day, but not particularly terrible. By the end of it, I still had a place to live and was in good health, so I marked it up as a net positive. These were things too many took for granted. I curled up on the bench and, warmed underneath a spotlight, dozed off.
It wasn’t the screaming that shook me up cold, but that terrible crash that bellowed through the corridors. Stricken with waking paralysis, I craned my head around to try to identify the sound’s origin. Another crash boomed across the lobby, followed by a series of staccato bellows. It was an assault that was enough to wake the dead. I tracked the sound and saw several security personnel rushing through to the engineering labs.
I was still processing the commotion when, suddenly, a scream ripped through the air and hammered my ears. It was unlike anything I ever heard before, sounding like a roar violating a shriek. The cry was so inhuman that my body seized taut, my mind unable to find a reaction to it. A shiver crawled along my back and the air became silent once again. I sat and gazed at the entrance to the labs. I could hear nothing but my own heartbeat.
To this day, I still don’t know why I entered the gates.
As I crept through the hallway connecting the labs, a distant dread filled me. My eyes widened, trying to take in as much light as they could in the corridor that seemed darker than normal. I tiptoed, daring not to antagonize whatever terror lived ahead. What was it? What could have produced such a wicked screech? I blinked and shook my head. The hallway lengthened, and the lights that peppered its spine began to oscillate to an ominous heartbeat. I pulled my back against the wall and took a deep breath. I gathered some nerves and crept along with my back still against the wall. I didn’t try to turn back—I had forgotten where the exit was.
Vague red hues latched along the hallway where the lights should have been. The sharp screams continued to taunt me in my ears. The hallway stretched and dimmed again and then terminated itself into a single bleak point. Something filled the hall, and I felt like I was crawling through sewage that stifled my movements and strangled the oxygen away.
Another scream ripped into the hallway and pressed against my eardrum. It threatened to tear into my brain. I plugged the holes in my head with my hands to bar away the sound. They bled through anyway. Fuck it. Fuck it! I ran.
I didn’t know where I was running to, but just that I needed to run. Just run, just run, run. The last thing I remembered was a blinding flash when I crashed into a white wall. The whiteness glazed over until the world dimmed.