“Hey, Randy.”
“Hey, Chester.”
So Chester’s back from the bathroom. He looks exactly like the Chester of old, except spread out over a somewhat larger volume, like the classic demo of the expanding-universe theory in which a face, or some other figure, is drawn on a partly inflated balloon which is then inflated some more. The pores have gotten larger, and the individual shafts of hair farther apart, which produces an illusion of impending baldness. It seems like even his eyes have gotten farther apart and the flecks of color in the irises grown into blotches. He is not necessarily fat—he has the same rumpled heftiness he used to. Since people do not literally grow after their late teens, this must be an illusion. Older people seem to take up a larger space in the room. Or maybe older people see more.
“How’s Avid?”
“As avid as ever,” Randy says, which is lame but obligatory. Chester is wearing a sort of photographer’s vest with a gratuitous number of small pockets, each of which is stuffed with gaming cards. Maybe that’s why he seems big. He has like twenty pounds of cards strapped to him. “I note that you have made the transition to card-based RPGs,” Randy says.
“Oh, yeah! It is so much better than the old pencil-and-paper way. Or even computer-mediated RPGs, with all due respect to the fine work that you and Avi did. What are you working on now?”
“Something that might actually be relevant to this,” Randy says. “I was just realizing that if you have a set of cryptographic protocols suitable for issuing an electronic currency that cannot be counterfeited—which oddly enough we do—you could adapt those same protocols to card games. Because each one of these cards is like a banknote. Some more valuable than others.”
Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances. “It’s already being done,” Chester says, when Randy’s finished. “In fact, that company you and Avi worked for in Minneapolis is one of the leaders—”
“I’d like you to meet my friend, Amy,” Randy interrupts, even though Amy is a good distance away, and not paying attention. But Randy is afraid that Chester’s about to tell him that stock in that Minneapolis company is now up to the point where its market capitalization exceeds that of General Dynamics, and that Randy should’ve held onto his shares. “Amy, this is my friend Chester,” Randy says, leading Chester between tables. At this point some of the gamers actually do look up interestedly—not at Amy, but at Chester, who (Randy infers) has probably got some one-of-a-kind cards tucked away in that vest, like THE THERMONUCLEAR ARSENAL OF THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS or YHWH. Chester exhibits a marked improvement in social skills, shaking Amy’s hand with no trace of awkwardness and dropping smoothly into a pretty decent imitation of a mature and well-rounded individual engaging in polite small talk. Before Randy knows it, Chester has invited them over to his house.
“I heard it wasn’t done yet,” Randy says.
“You must’ve seen the article in The Economist,” Chester says.
“That’s right.”
“If you’d seen the article in The New York Times, you’d know that the article in The Economist was wrong. I am now living in the house.”
“Well, it’d be fun to see it,” Randy says.
“Notice how well-paved my street is?” Chester says sourly, half an hour later. Randy has parked his hammered and scraped Acura in the guest parking lot of Chester’s house and Chester has parked his 1932 Dusenberg roadster in the garage, between a Lamborghini and some other vehicle that would appear to be literally an aircraft, built to hover on ducted fans.
“Uh, I can’t say that I did,” Randy says, trying not to gape at anything. Even the pavement under his feet is some kind of custom-made mosaic of Penrose tiles. “I sort of vaguely remember it as being broad and flat and not having any chuckholes. Well-paved, in other words.”
“This,” Chester says, head-faking towards his house, “was the first house to trigger the LOHO.”
“LOHO?”
“The Ludicrously Oversized Home Ordinance. Some malcontents rammed it through the city council. You get these, like cardiovascular surgeons and trust-fund parasites who like to have big nice houses, but God forbid some dirty hacker should try to build a house of his own, and send a few cement trucks down their street occasionally.”
“They made you repave the street?”
“They made me repave half the fucking town,” Chester says. “I mean, some of the neighbors were griping that the house was an eyesore, but after we got off on the wrong foot my attitude was, to hell with ’em.” Indeed, Chester’s house does resemble nothing so much as a regional trucking hub with a roof made entirely of glass. He waves his arm down a patchily turfed slab of mud that slopes down into Lake Washington. “Obviously the landscaping hasn’t even begun yet. So it looks like a science fair project on erosion.”
“I was going to say the Battle of the Somme,” Randy says.
“Not as good an analogy because there are no trenches,” Chester says. He is still pointing down towards the lake. “But if you look near the waterline you can just make out some railroad ties, half-buried. That’s where we laid the tracks.”
“Tracks?” Amy says, the only word she’s been able to get out of her mouth since Randy drove his Acura through the main gate. Randy told her, on the way over here, that if he, Randy, had a hundred thousand dollars for every order of magnitude by which Chester’s net worth currently exceeds his, then he (Randy) would never have to work again. This turned out to be more clever than informative, and so Amy was not prepared for what they have found here and is still steepling her eyebrows.
“For the locomotive,” Chester says. “There are no railway lines nearby, so we barged the locomotive in and then winched it up a short railway into the foyer.”
Amy just scrunches up her face, silent.
“Amy hasn’t seen the articles,” Randy says.
“Oh! Sorry,” Chester says, “I’m into obsolete technology. The house is a museum of dead tech. Stick your hand into these things.”
Lined up before the front entrance are four waist-high pedestals, emblazoned with the Novus Ordo Seclorum eyeball/pyramid logo, with outlines of hands stenciled onto their lids, and knobs in the lagoons between the fingers. Randy fits his hand into place and feels the knobs slide in their grooves, reading and memorizing the geometry of his hand. “The house knows who you are now,” Chester says, typing their names into a ruggedized, weatherproofed keyboard, “and I’m giving you a certain privilege constellation that I use for personal guests—now you can come in through the main gate and park your car and wander around the grounds whether or not I’m home. And you can enter the house if I’m home, but if I’m not home, it’ll be locked to you. And you can wander freely in the house except for certain offices where I keep proprietary corporate documents.”
“You have your own company or something?” Amy says weakly.
“No. After Randy and Avi left town, I dropped out of college and snagged a job with a local company, which I still have,” Chester says.
The front door, a translucent crystal slab on a track, slides open. Randy and Amy follow Chester into his house. As advertised, there is a full-scale steam locomotive in the foyer.
“The house is patterned after flex-space,” Chester says.
“What’s that?” Amy asks. She is completely turned off by the locomotive.
“A lot of high-tech companies get started in flex-spa
ce, which just means a big warehouse with no internal walls or partitions—just a few pillars to hold up the ceiling. You can drag partitions around to divide it up into rooms.”
“Like cubicles?”
“Same idea, but the partitions go up higher so you have a feeling of being in a real room. Of course, they don’t go all the way up to the ceiling. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be room for the TWA.”
“The what?” Amy asks. Chester, who is leading them into the maze of partitions, answers the question by tilting his head back and looking straight up.
The roof of the house is made entirely of glass, held up by a trusswork of white painted steel tubes. It is maybe forty or fifty feet above the floor. The partitions rise to a height of maybe twelve feet. In the gap above the partitions and below the ceiling, a grid has been constructed, a scaffolding of red pipes, nearly as vast as the house itself. Thousands, millions, of aluminum shreds are trapped in that space grid, like torn tufts caught in a three-dimensional screen. It looks like an artillery shell the length of a football field that has exploded into shrapnel a microsecond ago and been frozen in place; light filters through the metal scraps, trickles down bundles of shredded wiring and glances flatly off the crusts of melted and hardened upholstery. It is so vast and so close that when Amy and Randy first look up at it they flinch, expecting it to fall on them. Randy already knows what it is. But Amy has to stare at it for a long time, and prowl from room to room, viewing it from different angles, before it takes shape in her mind, and becomes recognizable as something familiar: a 747.
“The FAA and NTSB were surprisingly cool about it,” Chester muses. “Which makes sense. I mean, they’ve reconstructed this thing in a hangar, right? Dredged up all the pieces, figured out where they go, and hung them on this grid. They’ve gone over it and gathered all the forensic evidence they could find, hosed out all the human remains and disposed of them properly, sterilized the debris so that the crash investigation team doesn’t have to worry about getting AIDS from touching a bloody flange or something. And they’re done with it. And they’re paying like rent on this hangar. They can’t throw it away. They have to store it somewhere. So all I had to do was get the house certified as a federal warehouse, which was a pretty easy legal hack. And if there’s a lawsuit, I have to let the lawyers in to go over it. But really it was not a problem to do this. The Boeing guys love it, they’re over here all the time.”
“It’s like a resource to them,” Randy guesses.
“Yeah.”
“You like to play that role.”
“Sure! I have defined a privilege constellation specifically for engineer types who can come here anytime they want to access the house as a museum of dead tech. That’s what I mean by the flex space analogy. To me and my guests, it’s a home. To these visitors… there’s one right there.” Chester waves his arm across the room (it is a central room maybe fifty meters on a side) at an engineer type who has set up a Hasselblad on a huge tripod and is pointing it straight up at a bent landing gear strut “ . . . to them it’s exactly like a museum in that there are places they can go and other places that if they step over the line will set off alarms and get them in trouble.”
“Is there a gift shop?” Amy jokes.
“The gift shop is roughed in, but not up and running—the LOHO throws up all kinds of impediments,” Chester grumbles.
They end up in a relatively cozy glass-walled room with a view across the churned mud to the lake. Chester fires up an espresso machine that looks like a scale model of an oil refinery and generates a brace of lattes. This room happens to be underneath the TWA’s left wing tip, which is relatively intact. Randy realizes, now, that the entire plane has been hung in a gentle banking attitude, like it’s making an imperceptible course change, which is not really appropriate; a vertical dive would make more sense, but then the house would have to be fifty stories high to accommodate it. He can see a repeating pattern of tears in the wing’s skin that seems to be an expression of the same underlying math that generates repeating vortices in a wake, or swirls in a Mandelbrot set. Charlene and his friends used to heckle him for being a Platonist, but everywhere he goes he sees the same few ideal forms shadowed in the physical world. Maybe he’s just stupid or something.
The house lacks a woman’s touch. Randy gathers, from hints dropped by Chester, that the TWA has not turned out to be the conversation starter that he had hoped it would be. He is considering building fake ceilings over some of the house’s partitions so that they will feel more like rooms, which, he admits, might make “some people” feel more comfortable there and open the possibility of their committing themselves to “an extended stay.” So evidently he is in early negotiations with some kind of female, which is good news.
“Chester, two years ago you sent me e-mail about a project you were launching to build replicas of early computers. You wanted information about my grandfather’s work.”
“Yeah,” Chester says. “You want to see that stuff? It’s been on the back burner, but—”
“I just inherited some of his notebooks,” Randy says.
Chester’s eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.
“I want to know if you have a functioning ETC card reader.”
Chester snorts. “That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“You want a 1932 Mark III card reader? Or a 1938 Mark IV? Or a—”
“Does it make any difference? They all read the same cards, right?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“I have some cards from circa 1945 that I would like to have read out onto a floppy disk that I can take home.”
Chester picks up a cellphone the size of a gherkin and begins to prod it. “I’ll call my card man,” he says. “Retired ETC engineer. Lives on Mercer Island. Comes up here on his boat a couple times a week and tinkers with this stuff. He’ll be really excited to meet you.”
While Chester is conversing with his card man, Amy meets Randy’s eyes and gives him a look that is almost perfectly unreadable. She seems a bit deflated. Worn down. Ready to go home. Her very unwillingness to show her feelings confirms this. Before this trip, Amy would have agreed that it takes all kinds to make a world. She’d still assent to it now. But Randy’s been showing her some practical applications of that concept, in the last few days, that are going to take her a while to fit into her world-view. Or, more importantly, into her Randy-view. And sure enough, the moment Chester’s off the phone, she’s asking if she can use it to call the airlines. There is only a momentary upward flick of the eyes towards the TWA. And once Chester gets over his astonishment that anyone still uses voice technology to make airline reservations in this day and age, he takes her to the nearest computer (there is a fully outfitted UNIX machine in every room) and patches into the airline databases directly and begins searching for the optimal route back home. Randy goes and stares out the window at the chilly whitecaps slapping the mud shore and fights the urge to just stay here in Seattle, which is a town where he could be very happy. Behind him Chester and Amy keep saying “Manila,” and it sounds ridiculously exotic and hard to reach. Randy thinks that he is marginally smarter than Chester and would be even richer if he’d only stayed here.
A fast white boat comes larruping around the point from the direction of Mercer Island and banks towards him. Randy sets down his cold coffee and goes out to his car and retrieves a certain trunk—a lovely gift from a delighted Aunt Nina. It is full of certain old treasures, like his grandfather’s high school physics notebooks. He sets aside (for example) a box labeled HARVARD-WATERHOUSE PRIME FACTOR CHALLENGE ’49-52 to reveal a stack of bricks, neatly wrapped in paper that has gone gold with age, each consisting of a short stack of ETC cards, and each labeled ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS with a date from 1944 or ’45. They have been in suspended animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead me
dium, and now Randy is going to breathe life into them again, and maybe send them out on the Net, a few strands of fossil DNA broken out of their amber shells and released in the world again.
Probably they will fail and die, but if they flourish, it should make Randy’s life a little more interesting. Not that it’s devoid of interest now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones.
ROCK
* * *
BUNDOK IS GOOD ROCK; WHOEVER PICKED IT MUST have known this. That basalt is so strong that Goto Dengo can carve into it any system of tunnels that he desires. As long as he observes a few basic engineering principles, he need not worry about tunnels collapsing.
Of course, cutting holes into such rock is hard work. But Captain Noda and Lieutenant Mori have provided him with an unlimited supply of Chinese laborers. At first the chatter of their drills drowns out the sounds of the jungle. Later, as they burrow into the earth, it fades to a thick tamping beat, leaving only the buzzing drone of the air compressors. Even at night they work by the dim light of lanterns, which cannot penetrate the canopy overhead. Not that MacArthur is sending observation planes over Luzon in the middle of the night, but work lights shining up on the mountain would be noticed by the lowland Filipinos.
The inclined shaft connecting the bottom of Lake Yamamoto to Golgotha is by far the longest part of the complex, but it need not have a very great diameter: just big enough for a single worker to worm his way up to the end and operate his drill. Before the lake is created, Goto Dengo has a crew dig the extreme upper end of that shaft, tunneling out and down from the riverbank with a dip angle of some twenty degrees. This excavation continually fills up with water—it is effectively a well—and removing the waste rock is murder, because it all has to be hauled uphill. So when it has proceeded for some five meters, Goto Dengo has the opening sealed up with stones and mortar.