Annabel Scheme (7 page)

Soon after that, the World of Jesus faded to black and the falafel shop’s back room appeared again through Scheme’s earrings. I turned my head to look around. Nothing happened. Then I remembered I couldn’t do that here.

“Fadi’s dead,” Scheme said, and it came out like a sigh. She stood up and rubbed her eyes, then switched off the monitor. His humble nest here in the back of the restaurant suddenly felt haunted.

Maybe he’s not dead, Scheme. Maybe he’s just...

Well, I couldn’t think of any alternatives.

Scheme shook her head. “I’ve never actually seen this before, but it makes sense. For the dead, these games are the perfect environment. They’re familiar. They disguise certain... differences. They probably don’t resist the way the real world does.”

What about Jack Zapp—is he okay?

“Well. Still dead. But otherwise, I imagine so. It’s just a game.”

I felt sad. Both because Fadi was dead and because we’d left World of Jesus. Looking through Scheme’s earrings, everything was just the way it had been before: splintered, flickering, overexposed. Ugh. I shut off the feed and thought of the Jerusalem sky.

“We’re going to Grail,” Scheme said, with a hard edge in her voice.

I brought the feed back up in time to see her walk out through the falafel shop’s sliding door, out into the swirling gray.

THE SHARD

Here’s the official story, straight from the Grail intranet: To choose the location for the Shard, Grail analyzed a century’s worth of climate data to pinpoint the single sunniest spot in downtown San Francisco. They put the building together like a Lego set—built it from a palette of just ten different tiny parts. The parts were made of steel and carbon and they could be snapped together in a hundred different ways. They were manufactured in China, and they came into the city by the boatload. The Shard went up, brick by brick, like the pyramids.

Then Grail wrapped the crenelated mass in smooth, curving crystalline panels. The panels gathered and conducted sunlight, then beamed it into the core of the building, where it became electricity. The electricity flowed down into motors that spun giant cylinders of solid gray bismuth—the Shard’s flywheel batteries. They were pure engineering elegance: they stored energy and fed it back into the Shard,
and
they served as gyroscopic counterweights to protect the building from earthquakes. In theory—and of course Grail modeled this—San Francisco could tip up like the deck of a sinking ship and the Shard would stay standing, pointed at the sky.

But now the sun didn’t shine on the Shard. The building still ran; Grailers came and went, and lights twinkled red, yellow, green and blue up and down its height. Where did the power come from? Were the flywheels still spinning? Was there a backup line to PG&E? A small nuclear reactor? The intranet did not specify.

Whatever it was, the Shard was an oasis of light and stability in the swirling weirdness of Fog City. It was the calm eye in the center of the storm. At least that’s how it seemed.

Standing there in the ground-floor lobby was like standing on the bulls-eye of a giant dart board, and people all over the world were flinging their questions and hopes and fears at you. They were projected in rainbow-colored letters two feet tall, racing across screens that covered the full curve of the back wall:

WHO WAS THE PRESIDENT IN 1997
WHO WAS PAUL KLEE
WHO WILL I MARRY
HOW TO KISS
HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR DNA
WHAT IS A GOOD CREDIT SCORE
WHAT IS A BANANA BOX
WHAT IS LOVE
WHAT IS THE BEST ELECTRIC CAR
WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF GOAT FLU
WHAT DO MEN WANT
WHY DID CHINA BAN COMPUTERS
WHY DOES MY EYE TWITCH
WHY DO WE DREAM

It felt like home. Behind it all, chiseled into a slab of jet-black carbon, was Grail’s mission statement:

TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD'S DREAMS AND DESIRES AND MAKE THEM A REALITY

The girl at the front desk was obviously playing a video game.

“Welcome to Grail,” she said, shuffling windows on her screen. “How can I, uh. How can I help you.” Apparently they didn’t get many visitors here.

Scheme pulled a wide laminated card out of her pocket. It had her picture on it. “Annabel Scheme. Licensed search investigator. Following up on an anomaly.”

The girl looked blank. Her jumpsuit only had three merit badges. One of them was a bright-yellow smiley face.

“You have to scan that,” Scheme said, nudging the card closer. The girl’s mouth made a shape like
oh
and she waved the card across the surface of the desk. It made a soft
plink
.

“Wow,” she said, looking at her screen, “you’ve been here a lot.”

Scheme nodded. “You guys have a lot of problems.”

“So, go ahead. The search anomaly team is on the—”

“Thirteenth floor,” Scheme said. “I know.”

In the elevator, Scheme did not press the button for the thirteenth floor. Instead she pressed the button marked B6. That was the floor to which Fadi had made his biggest-ever delivery. It was the Shard’s deepest basement.

How often do you come here, Scheme?

“Less often now,” she said. “And as little as possible. I’m trying to stay away. But it’s like a magnet.”

I’d heard that before.

The elevator doors swished open and Scheme stepped out into a space so wide-open it seemed for a moment we were back out on the street. The floor stretched out like a football field. Harsh light, not intended for humans, glared down from a low ceiling.

It was a giant grid of trash. Plastic dumpsters on knobby black wheels were lined up in a yawning matrix. Hundreds of them. They were bright primary colors, and they made a spectrum. Closest to the elevator were a dozen rows of red dumpsters, each one overflowing with paper and cardboard. Orange was next, full of glass, green and brown and clear. My camera-eyes couldn’t tell what the rest of the rainbow held.

Overhead, there was a series of tubes that poked down, ran just below the ceiling, merged and split and finally opened up, one tube above each dumpster. Every few seconds, there was a rattling over-ture and a piece of trash shot out, perfectly sorted: a crumpled box, a half-empty cup, an old hard drive trailing wires.

The Shard definitely separated its recyclables.

“Guhhh,” Scheme groaned. Her hand flew up to her face. “Smells terrible. It’s—this whole floor is trash.”

There were narrow channels between the dumpsters, and Scheme edged deeper into the matrix. Yellow was electronics. The dumpsters were full of burnt-out circuit boards and hard drives and cooling fans. I saw a whole Grail server chassis. Eep.

Green was compost. There were half-empty smoothies and unraveled sushi rolls, blobs of pudding and splashes of pea soup. Lots of pea soup. Nobody liked the pea soup.

Scheme stalked down the row of green dumpsters, reaching up on tip-toe and peeking into each one in turn. The full diversity of organic matter was on display here, presented in every state of decomposition. I took notes in case Scheme later exhibited an allergic reaction or showed signs of salmonella.

And there, in a long dumpster at the very end of the row, were two huge plates piled high with falafel, hummus, and green-black tabbouleh. They were wrapped tight with transparent plastic. I was afraid the next thing I’d see would be Fadi’s stiff reaching fingers or his cold unblinking eyes. But it was just the plates. They hadn’t come down a tube; they had been set here, neatly, by human hands.

“What happened to you?” Scheme murmured. She poked at the plastic wrap with a finger. “Where did you go?”

Back in the elevator, I expected her to take us back to the lobby. Instead, she pushed the button for the forty-seventh floor.

Where are we going, Scheme?

“To see an old friend,” she said.

SEBDEX

The elevator had walls of glass, and above ground it ran along the outer surface of the Shard. I watched the rest of Fog City fade from outline to suggestion to—nothing. Dimensionless gray. Scheme’s face was reflected in the glass, lit up evenly like a 3D model. Her mouth was set tight.

The elevator chirped as it passed each floor. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two.
Chirp, chirp chirp.
Twenty-three.

“That was my floor.”

What?

“When I worked here,” Scheme said. “I got off at the twenty-third floor every day.”

What did you do?

“Not much. Design, supposedly. Mostly I got mad about things and took long lunch breaks.”

That’s hard to imagine.

“I was a different person,” she said. “You should have seen how I dressed. It was embarrassing.”

Chirp.
Forty-seven. The doors swished open. Scheme stepped out into a small, shadowed antechamber.

There was data projected on the walls, just as in the lobby, but here it was more than just queries. There was a real-time accounting of Grail’s income, penny by micropenny. There was a map of the Shard, floor by floor, with rainbow dots migrating like ants. There was a giant corporate to-do list, with items blinking off and on every millisecond. Hey—I used to read that to-do list.

There was also a receptionist, a skinny kid with a long nose who looked up as the elevator doors opened, and then looked down again immediately. I recognized him. It was Jad, the Grailer from Fadi’s shop.

“You,” Scheme said. “
You
work for
him
?”

“Sebdex is expecting you,” Jad said evenly, looking down at his own lap. The circles under his eyes looked even deeper and darker in the low light; the effect was skeletal.

“Of course he is,” Scheme said. She swooped in close, and Jad lurched back. In a low hiss, she said: “Piece of advice. Quit.”

Scheme stepped past his desk, through a short corridor, and out into the circle of the forty-seventh floor. It was wide-open but not that wide across; we were close to the Shard’s sharp peak. The walls were all glass, and weak silvery light pressed in from outside.

On the far side of the floor, there was a cluster of tables—just raw spans of shiny material pitched across sawhorses—each supporting two or three monitors that glowed in the gloom. Seated at one of the tables, there was a man. When Scheme stepped out of the elevator, he straightened, but didn’t turn.

“It’s been a while, Bel,” he said. His voice was raspy but it carried across the floor. He was silhouetted against the gray glow. His head was completely smooth, and his ears stuck out like antennae.

Scheme set out across the floor. Three steps in, the man raised a hand and said: “Stop.” It came like the crack of a whip—a whip with a bunch of rattling, dried-up old bones tied to the end of it. Then, more gently: “Don’t step there.”

The floor was marked with white chalk; spidery lines traced out a circular maze. Cables snaked into the maze, ran through the curving channels, and converged in the center, where there was a white plastic cylinder, about the size of a blender. The quantum computer. There were still traces of yellow foam.

“Come around.”

His given name was Sebastian Dexter, but the whole world called him something different. I knew the other name better than most, because it was all over my source code. Like a surgeon who stitches his name into your heart: Sebdex.

That had been his handle from the age of thirteen, ever since his first encounter with a BBS, discovered two area codes away in back-road Kentucky and dialed furtively in deepest night. (Every magazine profile started with that BBS. The phone call that transformed the kid with nothing into, eventually, the man with everything.) Sebdex
was
Grail. He wrote its first spider and set it loose on the web. He wrote the first algorithms that could sense subtle threads of authority in a document. And he wrote the code that allows me to write this. Grail’s ticker symbol wasn’t GRAIL. It was SBDX. For him, one name was enough, like Sting or Prince or Bono or Frodo. He was Sebdex, just Sebdex, only Sebdex.

But there was apparently at least one person in the world who refused to use his
nom de net
.

“Sebastian,” Scheme said. “What the hell is this?”

“Why are you here,” he asked, flatly. He didn’t look up.

“Why is
that
here,” Scheme said, poking her chin at the quantum computer in the center of the floor.

“It belongs to me. And it won’t be here long.” He was still absorbed in his screens. The data projected around Jad’s desk was displayed here, too. “My project is almost finished.”

“I’ve met that banana box before,” Scheme said. “I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now.”

Sebdex sighed and bowed his head a little. “Jennifer Halais was, obviously, not supposed to have it. She stole it, Bel, and I should have said this already. But. Thank you for finding it.”

I had a closer view of Sebdex’s profile now. Some features I recognized from pictures: Bright green eyes. Cheekbones that jutted out, sharp-edged, from his face. He could have been handsome. But he wasn’t bald in pictures. And the rest of him was—
wrong
. He sat in his chair at a strange angle, and his neck seemed squashed, as if he was missing vertebrae. Some of his joints didn’t line up exactly right—shoulders and wrists. Maybe he had a disease. (The magazine profiles didn’t say anything about a disease.)