He turned to her, his expression puzzled. “There is-was-not life-as-understood in range of…snerf. This…resurrection…may-must require a…an…” He closed his mouth, squinted, and seemed to be straining for a word. “…opp..portun…ity.”
Next time she would demand a SUNY graduate, or at least someone who had taken their ESL course. “An opportunity. Well. You’ve got the opportunity. Use it.” She pointed again. “Please, Mr. Stypek. If you don’t, there’s going to be trouble.”
As pale as he was, he seemed to turn paler. “Yes, chatelaine. Done with alacrity be will it.”
The odd young man (who seemed to have learned what English he knew from Yoda) nudged aside his vest with his right hand, and drew out something that at first resembled a sharpening steel. Instead of metal or ceramic, the elaborately carved black handle supported a polished glass rod as thick as her ring finger, with a smooth rounded end and an odd glisten to it. Inside the rod shone eight tiny blue-white lights. Their brilliance dazzled the eyes like the blue LEDs in her DVD player. The lights’ halos seemed to spin slowly, each in a direction unlike that of all the others.
Carolyn expected him to plug it into a hole in the back of the OAF somewhere, but no: He inverted it and held the handle with both hands, the rod pointed upward like a sword in a bad King Arthur movie.
What had been severe eccentricity was tipping abruptly into weirdness. “What’s…that?”
This time he spoke with less hesitation, and his earlier difficulty made his words stranger still. “It is…a shadow of potentiality, cast equally upon…all possibility.”
“Um…I think I’ll go find those doughnuts.” And perhaps call 9-1-1 while she was at it?
His voice went a little lower. “Please stay, chatelaine. You are…embedded in the…problem. You must be embedded in the solution.”
Embedded? King Arthur, hell. This was turning into Terror in the Wax Museum. The peculiar Mr. Stypek reached up with his left hand, and gripped the glass whatchamacallit between thumb and forefinger as though pinching one of the blue-white stars it contained. Carolyn turned to flee the room.
Ping!
She felt it in her sinuses more than heard it in her ears: a deep, pure note like a giant tapping the edge of a crystal goblet the size of a traffic circle. The moment stretched out in her head, and stuttered thunderously, as though God were merging two halves of some titanic shuffled deck of cards. Carolyn whirled around the corner outside the door of the copy room, and ran head-on into a short, stocky white-haired man in a tweed jacket.
“Cosmo! What are you doing here?” She gripped his arms just below the shoulders, glad for the presence of someone familiar and ordinary.
Well, ok, familiar.
He reached up and pushed the brim of a bright blue Zertek hard hat a little further back on his head. The hat had many small things bolted to it, including a ring of lenses and much thin wire. A flat, rainbow-colored cable ran down from the hat under his jacket, and more equipment was attached to his belt.
The elderly computer scientist smiled. Something in his pocket was beeping, as always. “Slow down, dear. Relax! I’m here to fix the OAF, of course.”
10: Carolyn
Carolyn was certainly relieved to see Cosmo, but the deeper the evening grew, the farther she felt like she’d fallen down a rabbit hole. “Um…someone’s already here to fix it.” She grabbed the old man’s wrist and hauled him back toward the copy room.
Bartholomew Stypek was still there by the OAF, looking wide-eyed and perplexed. Cosmo stepped past Carolyn and thrust out his hand. “Cosmas Damian Klein, Ph.D., Zertek Architectures Program. Call me ‘Cosmo;’ doctors fix hemorrhoids.”
Carolyn watched Stypek take Cosmo’s hand with an apprehensive look on his face, as though he expected the older man to unscrew it at the wrist and run off with it. Cosmo shook it with his characteristic enthusiasm, and Stypek’s arm seemed to rattle all the way to the shoulder.
“So! You’re new here. I can’t keep track of all the hires. So much good talent coming in! I sometimes wish I could get a team back and actually implement some ideas of mine. We’re wasting half of the Tridiac architecture. Imagine: three dimensions of active devices to play in, and we’re still ice-skating over the top of it!”
“Cosmo?”
“I insisted that they implement a fully rewriteable instruction decode engine—like that’s so difficult with five or six vertical layers?—and now they refuse to use it. I’d crack heads, if there weren’t so much invested in those heads.”
“Cosmo!”
“Yes, dear. Sorry. Just a little shoptalk. They’ve kicked me upstairs and I don’t have direct reports anymore. I miss my old crowd of eccentric wizards at arm’s length in every direction!”
Carolyn took a deep breath. “Guys, I really need this thing to work. Please!”
Cosmo nodded. “Won’t take much. This is a level 0 unit, pre-alpha. More of a research platform than anything else. So, son, what’s your name?”
“Stypek.”
“Good! Let’s get to work. By the way, have Roger down in IT order you a hard hat. Everybody should have one. I borrowed pots from the break room a time or two when I was in field engineering in the ‘70s and was doing warehouse automation. It looks funny. Still, don’t be vain and go without one. I like Woody Allen as much as anybody, but my brain is my first favorite organ!”
Carolyn giggled. She watched Cosmo pull a small tapper from his jacket pocket and thumb the power button. The electric-blue hexagon splash art appeared instantly.
“So. Have you been trained on the OAF platform yet?”
Stypek shook his head.
“Hmm. Well, we’re short-staffed, and with all that commotion today Brandon’s people certainly have other things on their minds. So let me show you.” Cosmo pushed past Carolyn and stood beside Stypek. He reached around to the back panel of the machine, and pulled forward on some sort of latch. The entire top surface of the OAF rose in one smooth, slow motion until it was vertical. Cosmo plugged the tapper into a dock hidden amidst the ratsnest of wires and black metal frames now exposed to view.
The older man leaned down over the OAF. He touched the dark front panel with one finger. The Zertek hexagon appeared with a microphone icon at its center. “AI Daley. User Cosmo. Voiceauth. Key Begin: ‘So what we saw before us was a porous brontosaurus.’ Key End.”
All around the hexagon other icons appeared. Cosmo tapped one. A red-bearded cartoon leprechaun wearing a green bowler hat and greasy green overalls appeared. It waved a monkey wrench in one hand while speaking in a gruff voice with a very thick Chicago accent. “Got the OAF by da tail, Boss!”
Cosmo nodded. “Download and preserve the current data state, and then upload and reinstall the OS, with all updates applied. Restore data state. Go.”
The leprechaun reached out with its free hand and made a fist, which then grew hugely as it approached the inside of the tapper screen. Cosmo made a fist as well, then reached down and touched one knobby knuckle to the screen. Carolyn heard a tinny little metallic clank from Cosmo’s tapper. The leprechaun then vanished in a cloud of smoke.
Cosmo dusted his hands together theatrically. “This job is so much fun!” The scientist leaned back against the shelves, obviously waiting for the leprechaun to do its work.
Things still weren’t adding up. “Cosmo, why did you come out?”
“Why?” He gestured at the OAF. “To get this thing working for you.”
“No. I mean, who told you I was in trouble?”
“Eh? Well, Brandon, of course. Fine man! He may not make a good husband, but he’s a true friend.”
Carolyn would have to think about that. “Then what about him?” Carolyn nodded toward Stypek.
“New hire, I’m sure, from the internship program. A second pair of eyes is always good when you’re debugging. Brandon’s people are all busy fixing the pandemonium on the floor in Building 800. It was sweet of him to call around until he found someone to send out
here ASAP. Good man! Hiring him was the best decision I ever made.”
From the tapper down in the OAF’s innards they heard four majestic orchestral notes: the opening motif from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Cosmo stood erect, grinning. “V for Victory!” He reached in and plucked the tapper out of its socket, then swung the top panel of the OAF down until it latched in place.
The leprechaun reappeared on the tapper screen. Carolyn squinted at the display: The green bowler was still there, but now the creature was wearing a little black dress. In one hand it held a dripping pickle; in the other, a magic wand. It wore startling red lipstick. In the very un-Chicago voice of Marguerite Vierniesel, it spoke:
“No grief is that cannot be undone. All is well. All is as it was.”
Cosmo chuckled. “Good one! Daley, go to bed. And tell Ted that I’ll burn him back the next chance I get!”
On the display, the leprechaun puckered up and brought its fire-engine red lips to the inside of the screen. Cosmo shook his head, still chuckling, and brought the tapper to his lips. “Smack on ya!”
The tapper screen winked to black.
“Cosmo?” As odd as he was, AILING’s new hire Stypek now seemed perhaps a little less odd.
“Never mind us, dear. We’re always playing little tricks on each other. One of my former graduate students supports the OAF software now. He fooled with the archetype on the fixing-and-entering AI. The pickle was a nice touch. We got you out of a big one, eh?”
Carolyn nodded, suspicious. Pickles, well, pickles had started this whole business…
Cosmo tapped the OAF’s reset button. The machine beeped once and purred back to life. Sheets began to march into the output tray.
Carolyn picked one up. It was the hardcopy of Shavin’s interrupted slide show that she had tried to print from her tapper after the OAF failed. She felt her whole body relax. This long day really was over.
“Stypek, here.” Cosmo handed the tapper to the odd man, who took it with obvious apprehension. “I didn’t log out of Daley. Keep it for a few days until we’re sure Carolyn’s OAF doesn’t relapse. If it does, well, plug him back in and tell him to do the job right this time.”
Stypek nodded.
“Son, is there anything else you need to get started now that you’re here?”
Stypek’s accent made him sound perplexed, and he was still straining a little between words. “I need to…rent a…cave.”
“A cave? Ah! A man cave. The word here would be ‘room,’ or ‘studio.’ Nothing like learning English from American TV, eh?” Cosmo turned to Carolyn. “Now, dear, I’m still leasing your barn. Is the little room in the loft empty?”
Carolyn felt herself blanch. “Cosmo, really, no one’s been up there in almost a year…” Not since the last time she had put up someone’s Transylvanian grad student on short notice.
“Well, great! A little dust won’t kill him; you should see how grad students live in Eastern Europe! Vlad thought it was the Grand Hyatt, heh. Just make sure he’s fed and dry for a few days until we figure out where he’s going. I’ll get him on somebody’s car pool route. Email me an invoice for a week’s room and board. I’ll have Marcella expedite it. You’re so sweet!”
“Cosmo…”
“And I promise, if the OAF goes down again, Stypek will drop everything and be out here to take care of it. Really!”
“Thanks, but…”
He grasped her hand and squeezed it briefly. “You’re very welcome! Always a pleasure to see you, dear! I’ll message Brandon and tell him it’s all better. And now, as they say in France, avaunt!”
He turned and left the copy room. She heard the office’s front door close seconds later.
Carolyn took a deep breath and puffed her cheeks out while she released it. Victory had been seized from the jaws of weirdness. It was the AILING way. There was, of course, a cost. As her mother had taught her in first grade: Favors are a chain that we climb into heaven! Chains, yeah. She certainly owed Brandon one now. The OAF was happily pumping out all the delayed copy jobs that had been stacking up since that morning’s meeting. The sun would indeed rise on Monday.
And now she had yet another boarder from Transylvania. She was climbing as fast as she could, but Heaven still seemed a long way off.
“Chatelaine, why did the magician I summoned have only two eyes? Or is he merely an alchemist?”
Carolyn took the Plank Road turn east and settled into the comfortable fifty-mile-per-hour cruise that would lead her to her own bed, and then a blessed weekend alone.
Alone. Mostly. Her boarder was pushing the old Prius’s window switch back and forth, and seemed fascinated by the up-and-down motion of the glass. More than once he cupped his left hand and waved it slowly around over the door, as though it were a metal detector on a deserted beach.
“He’s not a magician.” Carolyn thought she knew what an alchemist was—hadn’t Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy?—but was too bleary to strain for details. “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘scientist.’” Summoned? Had he phoned Cosmo as well? For help? But Cosmo had obviously never heard of him. And then there was the glass rod, and the noise it had made…
“In my world, scien…tists, mmmm, have three eyes. Alchemists have two…or often as not, only one.”
Eyes. Camera lenses? “There were lenses on his hard hat. He does things like that. The last time we—I—” Ouch! “—saw him, he was working on some kind of image-processing thingie. Maybe that’s it. His pockets are always full of funny stuff. Just like yours.” She tried to smile and make the best of it. The last young man AILING had put up in her barn loft was not quite as strange, but had seemed much more sullen and suspicious. He spoke only when he had to, and refused all breakfast but a raw egg broken into boiled milk, followed by a pat of butter.
“My…thingie…may be in my pocket. I suspect so. Its words are like hers. I cannot…snerf her, alas.” He sounded sad.
“Her?” Perhaps a long distance girlfriend?
“My…AI. I need her badly.”
Carolyn sighed, thinking of the smalltalk-making AI barista in the agency’s coffee machine. A virtual girlfriend was probably better than none at all. “I understand.” She braked for the stop sign at Hogan Road.
When the Prius picked up speed again, Stypek began holding his cupped hands over the dashboard, his head cocked as though listening to the sounds of the motor. “What makes this…chariot…move by itself?”
“Car. The word is ‘car.’ Or ‘automobile.’ It’s a hybrid. I don’t know what makes it move. They have some kind of double engine, I think. I used to have a Diesel, and getting it to move by itself was a trick sometimes, especially in January. This thing, wow. It might as well be magic.”
Stypek jerked and sat up straight in his seat. “Metaphorically, but not in truth? There is no magic here.” Carolyn saw him swallow hard. He looked out the window into the night. “Or so I hope.”
Carolyn laughed. “All the stuff you guys do is magic to me. Cars, microwave ovens, cellphones, software. Especially software.”
He said nothing for what seemed a long time. “Soft wear. Tunics woven of fine thread, and well? Fails go the mapping. I’m sorry.”
Carolyn wasn’t sure what she could say to that, and in the uncomfortable silence she swung the wheel to the left into her driveway. The motion lights snapped on and cast their comfortable light on her house and barn. The Prius purred to its customary place beside the kitchen door, and stopped.
Stypek couldn’t seem to find the door handle. Carolyn had to open his door from the outside. He scrambled out with awkward haste.
She gestured toward her little white house. “Well, here we are. Casa Romero.”
He nodded, staring. The vinyl siding needed replacing, but Carolyn suspected it was a palace compared to what he had known in...whereverthehell he came from. “I always wanted to live in a Cape Cod, but we waited until we found one that had a little land. When we saw it, we grabbed it.” She sighed, an
noyed at herself for falling into ancient habits. It was hard to stop saying “we.”
He raised a finger to his chin. “Excellent, Chatelaine. Now, where do your servants live?”
She giggled. It was all so deadpan. Was he having fun with her, or was he truly as clueless as he sounded? “Servants? What for? Hey, I’m still strong enough to push a vacuum around.” She pointed toward the barn. “Come on. You need your man-cave, and I need some quiet time.” She crunched her way through the dried leaves on the flagstone walk that led toward the barn. Stypek crunched along behind her, still looking a little poleaxed.
The barn itself was older than the house, but the big door was modern. Carolyn flipped up the cover from the keypad. She turned to her new boarder. “How’s your memory for codes?” She hoped it was good; in a trembling fury she had snapped off the only key to the barn’s back door in the lock the day after it was all over.
“Flawless, Chatelaine.”
“So watch what I do.” At her first touch the pad lit up, and she spoke each number as he pressed it. “One. Zero. Three. One.” She winced. Yet another reminder. A Halloween bride, a scary man, and an even scarier marriage… “Enter.”
Again, when the big door motor kicked in, Stypek jumped. Carolyn didn’t even wait for it to stop moving. She ducked under as soon as the ducking was good and hoped he would follow.
The inside motion lights clicked on. The barn’s lower level was packed with piles of boxes and the stacked collection of ancient computers that Cosmo stored there and almost never touched. She knew that one of them was a PDP-8. Her first boyfriend at SUNY New Paltz had kept one in his dorm room, God help us—but geeky Larry had nothing on Bartholomew Stypek.
She trudged up the bare wooden stairway as quickly as fatigue would allow, and swung back the peeling old door at the landing. The fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling flickered a little when she flipped the switch.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 7
