The Black: Arrival

by Paul E. Cooley

  As they rounded the corner, Kate saw Jakob Benjamin sitting at the desk. The twenty-something looked up and smiled at them.

  “Done for the day?” He ran a hand through his curly, close-cropped hair.

  Kate laughed. “For the day, not for the week.”

  Jakob nodded. “Yeah. I got the memo. I’ll be manning things tomorrow night.” He pointed at her. “Just. For. You.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’ll have my daughter with me if you need some company.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “How old is she?”

  Jay cleared his throat. “Too young for you, horn dog.”

  “That’s, um, not what I— I mean—”

  Kate laughed. “He’s messing with you. She’s thirteen.”

  “Hmm,” Jakob said. “She’s going to be bored out of her mind. Unless you’re planning on letting her blow stuff up in the chemistry lab.”

  “She’ll be spending the weekend on the second floor. At least that’s the plan for now. Unless I come up with a miracle.” Kate tapped her foot. “Maybe you’ll look in on her from time to time?”

  He ran a hand down the front of his shirt. “Absolutely. I have to do rounds at night anyway. I can do that for you.”

  “Good.” Kate looked at Jay. “Ready to beat the traffic?”

  Jay scrunched up his face. “Darn’d tootin’.”

  “Okay, Yosemite Sam. Let’s do this. See you, Jakob.”

  He waved a hand to them and went back to studying his computer terminal. She wondered exactly what he spent his time doing, but had always been too terrified to ask. As long as Mike didn’t care, she shouldn’t either.

  She and Jay headed out of the doors and into the sunlight. A fast moving blanket of clouds left the world in twilight. “Shit. Big storm tomorrow?”

  “Yup,” Jay said. “Should make things fun.”

  “Right.” Kate smiled at him. “Mike’s going to page us with a delivery time.”

  He nodded. “Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon. If I can’t nap tomorrow, I’ll just come in and help Marie get ready.”

  “I figured.”

  “Until then, Madame,” he said as Pepé Le Pew.

  “Until then.”

  *****

  The new NOC. Chuckles flashed his badge at the black, rectangular sensor. A small green LED glowed above the panel. He grabbed the door handle and pulled. The heavy steel door swung open on silent hinges. The roar of air conditioning, blade fans, and power supplies slammed into his ear drums. He didn’t flinch. Instead, he grinned.

  Several pairs of full cover ear protection hung from the wall. Chuckles reached out and grabbed a pair. With his free hand, he pulled off his black flat-cap and placed it on the empty cart near the door. The thin strands of hair atop his head fluttered in the strong air flow. The roar died as he pulled on the ear protection.

  The NOC. Servers. Network gear. Everything. Ten racks of blades, hundreds of terabytes of storage, and all the bandwidth the buildings would ever need. He walked down the row. The dim overheads slowly brightened. The construction company may have fucked up the rest of the building, but at least they got this one right. Exactly as he’d imagined.

  Although the room wasn’t yet networked to the new fiber backbone, he was able to control it from the piece of shit NOC in the other building. Not that it really qualified as a network operations center. It was more of a large closet with hellaciously loud machines, terrible cooling, and a network that could barely provide streaming speeds.

  This was his baby. This room. These servers. All of this was his. Two years of planning. Two years of screaming at the CEO for the amount of money they needed. And two years of delays, promises, and vendor fuckery.

  Chuckles nodded to each cabinet as he walked by. The storage appliances were lit up like a racing tree. Greens, yellows, but thankfully, no reds. Burn-in. He’d spent the past several days lovingly hooking up each piece of hardware with some help from Stevo. Now the racks of blades were all running an incredibly dense bio program. Neil’s team had come up with this one to test their new DNA suite. It calculated mutation probabilities for the damned fruit fly genome. It was math he wasn’t capable of comprehending and it didn’t matter.

  The virtual machines on each blade, 32 per blade, were tied together as a single, monstrous number-crunching unit. The CPU lights were pegged. Chuckles grinned. If they survived crunching the data through the weekend, he’d be happy enough to certify them as ready for action.

  Which was good, because Neil’s team was already chomping at the bit to use them for their DNA studies. The old servers in the other building were proving a little slow. Performing a single run on their molecular models was taking longer each time. When HAL first started offering the service, a single batch took more than eight hours. Now with all the data shared across 20 different Cassandra instances, batches took up to 24 hours. Basically, Neil was falling behind.

  Chuckles petted the nearest cabinet, his skin tingling as it slid down the shining, black metal. “Tomorrow,” he said in an accent somewhere between a Texas drawl and a New Jersey nasal grunt, “we’ll see if you can handle some more load.”

  He turned his back on the cabinet and headed back toward the heavy NOC door. The hearing protection was excellent at muffling the server fans’ jet-engine decibels and the crackling and crunching of spinning drives, but they were incapable of damping down the heavy vibrations of all those machines running in a tight space.

  He was still grinning when he closed the server room door and replaced the hearing protection on its peg. He placed his cap back on his head, blew out a sigh, and walked back into the hallway. He knew the NOC lights would turn off in a few minutes. Once the motion detectors noticed stillness in the room, they automatically killed the lights to leave the servers doing their work in complete darkness, save for their blinking LED status lights.

  His pocket vibrated. Chuckles reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out the phone. Five new alerts. “Fucking piece of shit,” he said and walked back toward the skybridge. The old NOC was still the primary and still his problem child. He looked forward to pulling all of those old machines out into the loading dock and beating the ever loving shit out of them with a sledgehammer. Until then, he’d have to keep the damned system held together with chewing gum and baling wire. The phrase, one of his father’s favorites, bounced around in his head. Face expressionless, Chuckles chuckled. If anyone had been in the hall, they would have thought him insane.

  Chapter 2

  Bugs Bunny was getting the best of Daffy Duck. It was the episode with the abominable snowman. One of Jay's favorites.

  He reclined in the chair and put his black sneakers up on the desk. Jay loosed a yawn and closed his eyes. As Bugs talked to the snowman, he spoke every line in tandem. Mel Blanc might have voiced the cartoon more than half a century ago, but Jay voiced it now. And dammit if his Bugs and Daffy wasn't spot on. Maybe even better than Mel's.

  He knew every word, every nuance, every slight lilt or fall of the characters' speech. His wife had called him a mimic, but that was the wrong word. Jay didn't mimic; he recreated voices and sounds. And he constantly experimented. He heard the words in his head before he voiced them and his vocal cords followed suit. It wasn't particularly difficult.

  Children, like Kate’s daughter Maeve, always smiled when he used one of his voices. Didn’t matter if it was Bugs, Scooby, or any one of the other hundred voices that weren’t his. He could swing his voice from a guttural baritone to a ridiculously helium pitch.

  The abominable snowman was melting on screen. Jay opened his eyes and grinned. When he was a kid, this was his favorite of the Bugs cartoons. It was still his favorite.

  Speaking of Maeve, she and Kate would arrive soon. PPE’s sample would too. Jay pulled his feet off the desk and paused the video player. He sipped from his large Taz mug and grimaced. The coffee was lukewarm. And that was being kind. He stared down into the brown liquid. Yup, time to throw it
out and make a fresh carafe. It was going to be a long damned night.

  He reached for the mouse and clicked open the PPE requisition document. The standard list of tests scrolled by. However, there was one oddity. “Light test?” he said to the room.

  It wasn’t the strangest thing he’d seen on a requisition. Offshore drilling often led to the odd test. When a company drilled an exploration well in thousands of feet of water, they wanted to run every test they could. PPE wasn’t the first to drill in over 30k feet of water, but they were the company everyone was watching. The more test results they had, the more they could lie to the stockholders about what they’d found. Well, that was unkind. Not all assay releases were lies. Just most of them.

  Every employee at HAL signed non-disclosure agreements. It didn’t matter if you were the chief scientist or a janitor. The lawyers insisted on it. So did the industry itself. No one wanted their secrets getting out into the world. Not that it helped much.

  Industrial espionage was rife within the oil industry. Offshore, onshore, didn’t matter. The larger the possible find, the more interest by competitors. If a licensed area showed promise to one company, it was a safe bet others would try and muscle in as close to the find as possible. It was all a crap shoot, of course; one company could find a goldmine in one well and nothing but dead holes just a few hundred meters away.

  PPE was exploring a newly discovered trench called M2. It wasn’t actually “newly discovered,” but that’s how they were marketing it. It had been found over 2 years ago, but PPE hadn’t gotten their act together until recently. The sample was from their first exploratory well. Jay knew all eyes would be on the lab now. PPE was paying a small ransom to get fast answers. He knew why, too.

  Stockholders have little patience. They have even less foresight. If a company spends a billion dollars on licensing fees and the creation of a new rig, they want to see oil flowing. They want to hear how a production rig is going to be sent out immediately to drill, baby, drill. Only the black gold assuages their need for instant gratification. And corporate executives can only make so many “forward-looking” statements before The Street calls bullshit.

  Jay watched the industry like a hawk. Didn’t matter if it was something as cataclysmic as Shell restating the value of their reserves in Saudi, or Schlumberger inventing a new tool. The news mattered. It directly related to HAL’s success.

  One day, he’d actually want to retire. Maybe set himself up in Alaska at a fishing resort. Become a guide and fish the hell out of sock-eye. Then in winter, he could come back to Houston to hide from the brutal cold. Jay smiled.

  He rose from his chair, grabbed the mug, and headed toward the break room. Time to make more coffee. Time to prep the tests PPE had asked for. And more importantly, time to see what magic Marie had done.

  Marie was his and Kate’s assistant. She was only three years out of her PhD degree, but she was good. Not great, but good. She’d learn. Jay was sure that by the time he and Kate retired, Marie would be able to run the lab by herself.

  He headed out of his office into the brightly lit, sterile hallway. Jay yawned. His clipped footsteps echoed off the tiled walls. HAL felt more like a morgue or hospital than a chem-lab. At least that’s how Jay had always seen it. The new building would be better, but it was another few months before the company could relocate most of the staff.

  HAL owned two buildings. The first, the one they presently staffed, was built to handle both biological samples as well as chemical. On the biological side, HAL had never handled anything virulent or inherently dangerous; the bio-side primarily focused on mineral and soil samples.

  Once offshore drilling began in earnest, the company reorganized. The last decade had been a bonanza in terms of petrochemical analysis. Requisitions for oil assays had pushed HAL to run a 24 hour, five day a week business. But their building was busting at the seams.

  The executives bought the nearby lots and started construction on a new, larger, more modern building. The recession and subsequent bankruptcy of several building contractors had put the schedule into hellish delay. So every day, the employees of HAL had to look at the mostly-built hulk of the new building while heading into their familiar, run-down home.

  Jay entered the break room and sniffed the air. The ghostly scent of ground beans filled his nostrils. He smiled and headed to the coffee maker. Both carafes were empty. He knew that—he’d emptied both of them. But, being a bastard, he hadn’t bothered refilling either. Since it was late afternoon, there was little need. Until now.

  He pulled out the basket, popped in a fresh filter, and shook in the grounds. He placed one of the carafes below and punched the button. Lights blinked, water steamed, and Jay was in heaven.

  When you spent most of your workdays around volatile chemicals, you learned to appreciate certain smells. The chemists wore masks and protective clothing when on the job, but that didn’t mean you still didn’t get the acerbic stench of chemicals up your nose. Especially if you were dealing with crude.

  Sulfur, acetone, benzyne, you name it, crude could have it. As bad as the oil might stink, some of the reagents used for testing were worse. Spend all day in that olfactory hell, and you came to appreciate the little things. For Jay, that was definitely coffee.

  Light test. Right. He pulled his cell from his pocket and messaged Marie.

  You got the test list?

  A few seconds later, Marie responded in the affirmative. Jay nodded to himself and pocketed the phone. The coffee was ready. He emptied his mug, washed out the crap, and refilled it. With a fresh 16 ounces of black, he left the break room and headed down the hall.

  The stairwell was three flights of concrete and a steel railing. He took the steps to the lower level with care. The building had an elevator for the disabled and the just plain lazy, but he never used it. Jay glanced at the small glass windows high on the wall. Wan sunlight filtered through them. In no time at all, the sun would set and night would settle in.

  Jay reached the fire door and waved his badge in front of the reader. The heavy steel door clicked. He pulled on the handle and walked into the first floor hallway.

  The labs were located at the other end of the building. That way if there was some kind of fire or chemical leak, those in the offices on the second floor wouldn’t be affected. Jay clomped down the hallway until he reached the entryway to the two labs. The phrase “authorized personnel only” was etched into the glass door. He flashed his badge in front of the card reader. The glass slid aside and he walked through.

  Two metal doors stood on either side of the hallway. Jay sipped from the mug and then placed a hand on the fingerprint scanner. The scanner beeped as it took a photo of his fingers. He sighed and waited the requisite five seconds before the scanner beeped again and a green light appeared on the wall. Using his free hand, he pulled on the door handle.

  The door swung open to the side and he walked into a small, glass walled room that faced the actual lab. It was a changing area as well as for brief breaks between long-running tests. Jay took another sip of coffee and let his nose linger over the cup. The steaming mug helped blot out the palpable scent of solvents and crude.

  Jay put his coffee on the credenza. He eyed the row of lab coats hanging from metal hooks. Thursday night’s crew hadn’t had theirs cleaned yet. No wonder the place stank.

  A sign on the wall said “NO FOOD OR DRINK.” Jay wrinkled his nose at it and scanned the equipment cubbies. Masks. Check. Booties for footies? Check. Gloves? Check. Marie had no doubt already been through the checklist already. She was meticulous, even if she lacked the confidence to realize it.

  He looked out into the lab. The floor tiles were stained with every color of the rainbow. No matter how many times they scrubbed it, the caustic chemicals had permanently marked them. The new building, thirty years newer than this one, would have stain-proof tiles and a much friendlier cleaning regimen. At HAL, the chemists were responsible for everything in the lab, including the “janitorial�
� side. Bringing in custodial staff was a security no-no.

  Marie had prepped the area. Jay went through the tests in his mind. X-ray machine was ready. Slides were ready. Fluoroscope was clean. And in the back was the equipment for the light test. He pulled his phone out and checked the time. Maeve and Kate should be in the parking lot. He clucked his tongue, picked up his mug, and headed back out through the security doors.

  *****

  The lab was completely empty, as she knew it would be. Marie’s lab coat fluttered as she walked from station to station. She loaded the magnetic clipboards hanging from the steel tables with the testing parameters. Each station was for a different test. Once the barrel arrived, she, Kate, and Jay would start as many of the tests as possible. Especially the long running ones. While those proceeded, the team could run some of the short-duration examinations and then hurry up and wait.

  The rush jobs were the worst. Marie had canceled her weekend for the M2 hot-shot. Not that she’d had much of a weekend planned anyway.

  Alcos had once sent five barrels of oil from five different drill sites and demanded a 72-hour turn around. That was an all hands on deck situation. No one went home. No one left the building. Meals were ordered in. They slept on cots on the first floor near the labs. HAL smelled like a zoo for a week. But they’d finished the job in less than 48 hours. For that, HAL had been paid a LOT of money. And the execs were smart enough to pass on the good fortune.

  There were other labs to work in. Her PhD wasn’t even three years old, but she could get a job almost anywhere. Kate and Jay were fantastic, if tough, mentors and the entire industry knew it. So why stay at HAL? Simple. She loved it.

  Plus, Kate and Jay were good people. Despite how much she hated Jay’s constant supervision, she learned something new from the man every day. It could be something as small as how he worked a pipette, drizzling the oil in a solution, or something as important as clearing up analysis anomalies. Jay knew what he was doing. And Marie wanted to know everything Jay could teach her.