A fierce blast of air shot up from the floor, puffing up my trouser legs, ruffling my clothing. Almost immediately it was followed by blasts of air coming from both sides, then from top, blowing down hard on my hair and shoulders. Then a whoosh of vacuum. The glass in front of me slid laterally. I smoothed down my hair and stepped out.
"Sorry about that." Ricky shook my hand vigorously. "But at least we don't have to wear bunny suits," he said. I noticed that he looked strong, healthy. The muscles in his forearms were defined.
I said, "You look good, Ricky. Working out?"
"Oh, you know. Not really."
"You're pretty cut," I said. I punched him on the shoulder.
He grinned. "Just tension on the job. Did Vince frighten you?"
"Not exactly ..."
"He's a little strange," Ricky said. "Vince grew up alone out in the desert with his mother. She died when he was five. Body was pretty decomposed when they finally found her. Poor kid, he just didn't know what to do. I guess I'd be strange, too." Ricky gave a shrug. "But I'm glad you're here, Jack. I was afraid you wouldn't come." Despite Ricky's apparent good health, I was noticing now that he seemed nervous, edgy. He led me briskly down a short hallway. "So. How's Julia?"
"Broke her arm, and hit her head pretty badly. She's in the hospital for observation. But she's going to be all right."
"Good. That's good." He nodded quickly, continuing down a corridor. "Who's taking care of the kids?"
I told him that my sister was in town.
"Then you can stay awhile? A few days?"
I said, "I guess. If you need me that long." Ordinarily, software consultants don't spend a lot of time on-site. One day, maybe two. Not more than that.
Ricky glanced over his shoulder at me. "Did Julia, ah, explain to you about this place?"
"Not really, no."
"But you knew she was spending a lot of time here."
I said, "Oh sure. Yes."
"The last few weeks, she came out almost every day on the helicopter. Stayed over a couple of nights, too."
I said, "I didn't know she took such an interest in manufacturing."
Ricky seemed to hesitate a moment. Then he said, "Well, Jack, this is a whole new thing ..." He frowned. "She really didn't tell you anything?"
"No. Not really. Why?"
He didn't answer.
He opened the far door and waved me through. "This is our residential module, where everybody sleeps and eats."
The air was cool after the passageway. The walls were the same smooth Formica material. I heard a low, continuous whoosh of air handlers. A series of doors opened off the hallway. One of them had my name on it, written in marker on a piece of tape. Ricky opened the door. "Home sweet home, Jack."
The room was monastic-a small bed, a tiny desk just large enough to hold a workstation monitor and keyboard. Above the bed, a shelf for books and clothes. All the furniture had been coated with smooth-flowing white plastic laminate. There were no nooks or crannies to hold stray particles of dirt. There was no window in the room either, but a liquid-crystal screen showed a view of the desert outside.
There was a plastic watch and a belt with a plastic buckle on the bed. I put them on.
Ricky said, "Dump your gear, and I'll give you the tour."
Still keeping his brisk pace, he led me into a medium-size lounge with a couch and chairs around a coffee table, and a bulletin board on the wall. All the furniture here was the same flowing plastic laminate. "To the right is the kitchen and the rec room with TV, video games, so forth." We entered the small kitchen. There were two people there, a man and a woman, eating sandwiches standing up. "I think you know these guys," Ricky said, grinning. And I did. They had been on my team at MediaTronics.
Rosie Castro was dark, thin, exotic-looking, and sarcastic; she wore baggy cargo shorts and a T-shirt tight across her large breasts, which read YOU WISH. Independent and rebellious, Rosie had been a Shakespearean scholar at Harvard before she decided, in her words, that "Shakespeare is fucking dead. For fucking centuries. There is nothing new to say. What's the point?" She transferred to MIT, became a protegee of Robert Kim, working on natural language programming. It turned out she was brilliant at it. And these days natural language programs were starting to involve distributed processing. Because it turned out people evaluate a sentence in several ways simultaneously, while it is being spoken; they don't wait until it is finished but rather they form expectations of what is coming. That's a perfect situation for distributed processing, which can work on a problem at several points simultaneously. I said, "Still wearing those T-shirts, Rosie." At MediaTronics, we'd had some trouble about the way she dressed.
"Hey. Keeps the boys awake," she said, shrugging.
"Actually, we ignore them." I turned to David Brooks, stiff, formal, obsessively neat, and almost bald at twenty-eight. He blinked behind thick glasses. "They're not that good, anyway," he said. Rosie stuck her tongue out at him.
David was an engineer, and he had an engineer's bluntness and lack of social skills. He was also full of contradictions; although he fussed over every detail of his work and appearance, on weekends he raced a dirt bike, often coming back covered in mud. He shook my hand enthusiastically. "I'm very glad you're here, Jack."
I said, "Somebody's going to have to tell me why you're all so glad to see me." Rosie said, "Well, it's because you know more about the multi-agent algorithms that-"
"I'm going to show him around first," Ricky said, interrupting. "Then we'll talk."