“Eggplants. Tomatoes. Chiles. Potatoes. Jasmine. Nicotiana.” He held up his cigarette and quirked an eyebrow. “Tobacco.”
He drew again, squinting in the cigarette’s flare. All around, the shadowed desks and treadle computers of the company sat silent. In the evening, with the factory closed, it was just possible to mistake the empty desks for something other than the topography of failure. The workers might have only gone home, resting in anticipation of another hard day at their labors. Dust-mantled chairs and treadle computers put the lie to it—but in the dimness, with shadows draped across furniture and moonlight easing through mahogany shutters, it was possible to imagine what might have been.
Overhead, the crank fans continued their slow turns, Laotian rubber motorbands creaking rhythmically as they chained across the ceiling, drawing a steady trickle of kinetic power from the factory’s central kink-springs.
“The Thais have been lucky in their laboratories,” Yates said, “and now here you are. If I were superstitious, I’d think they conjured you along with their tomatoes. Every organism needs a predator, I understand.”
“You should have reported how much progress they were making,” Anderson said. “This factory wasn’t your only responsibility.”
Yates grimaced. His face was a study in tropic collapse. Broken blood vessels mapped rosy tributaries over his cheeks and punctuated the bulb of his nose. Watery blue eyes blinked back at Anderson, as hazy as the city’s dung-choked air. “I should have known you’d cut my niche.”
“It’s not personal.”
“Just my life’s work.” He laughed, a dry rattling reminiscent of early onset cibiscosis. The sound would have had Anderson backing out of the room if he didn’t know that Yates, like all of AgriGen’s personnel, had been inoculated against the new strains.
“I’ve spent years building this,” Yates said, “and you tell me it’s not personal.” He waved toward the office’s observation windows where they overlooked the manufacturing floor. “I’ve got kink-springs the size of my fist that hold a gigajoule of power. Quadruple the capacity-weight ratio of any other spring on the market. I’m sitting on a revolution in energy storage, and you’re throwing it away.” He leaned forward. “We haven’t had power this portable since gasoline.”
“Only if you can produce it.”
“We’re close,” Yates insisted. “Just the algae baths. They’re the only sticking point.”
Anderson said nothing. Yates seemed to take this as encouragement. “The fundamental concept is sound. Once the baths are producing in sufficient quantities—”
“You should have informed us when you first saw the nightshades in the markets. The Thais have been successfully growing potatoes for at least five seasons. They’re obviously sitting on top of a seedbank, and yet we heard nothing from you.”
“Not my department. I do energy storage. Not production.”
Anderson snorted. “Where are you going to get the calories to wind your fancy kink-springs if a crop fails? Blister rust is mutating every three seasons now. Recreational generippers are hacking into our designs for TotalNutrient Wheat and SoyPRO. Our last strain of HiGro Corn only beat weevil predation by sixty percent, and now we suddenly hear you’re sitting on top of a genetic gold mine. People are starving—”
Yates laughed. “Don’t talk to me about saving lives. I saw what happened with the seedbank in Finland.”
“We weren’t the ones who blew the vaults. No one knew the Finns were such fanatics.”
“Any fool on the street could have anticipated. Calorie companies do have a certain reputation.”
“It wasn’t my operation.”
Yates laughed again. “That’s always our excuse, isn’t it? The company goes in somewhere and we all stand back and wash our hands. Pretend like we weren’t the ones responsible. The company pulls SoyPRO from the Burmese market, and we all stand aside, saying intellectual property disputes aren’t our department. But people starve just the same.” He sucked on his cigarette, blew smoke. “I honestly don’t know how someone like you sleeps at night.”
“It’s easy. I say a little prayer to Noah and Saint Francis, and thank God we’re still one step ahead of blister rust.”
“That’s it then? You’ll shut the factory down?”
“No. Of course not. The kink-spring manufacturing will continue.”
“Oh?” Yates leaned forward, hopeful.
Anderson shrugged. “It’s a useful cover.”
The cigarette’s burning tip reaches Anderson’s fingers. He lets it fall into traffic. Rubs his singed thumb and index finger as Lao Gu pedals on through the clogged streets. Bangkok, City of Divine Beings, slides past.
Saffron-robed monks stroll along the sidewalks under the shade of black umbrellas. Children run in clusters, shoving and swarming, laughing and calling out to one another on their way to monastery schools. Street vendors extend arms draped with garlands of marigolds for temple offerings and hold up glinting amulets of revered monks to protect against everything from infertility to scabis mold. Food carts smoke and hiss with the scents of frying oil and fermented fish while around the ankles of their customers, the flicker-shimmer shapes of cheshires twine, yowling and hoping for scraps.
Overhead, the towers of Bangkok’s old Expansion loom, robed in vines and mold, windows long ago blown out, great bones picked clean. Without air conditioning or elevators to make them habitable, they stand and blister in the sun. The black smoke of illegal dung fires wafts from their pores, marking where Malayan refugees hurriedly scald chapatis and boil kopi before the white shirts can storm the sweltering heights and beat them for their infringements.
In the center of the traffic lanes, northern refugees from the coal war prostrate themselves with hands upstretched, exquisitely polite in postures of need. Cycles and rickshaws and megodont wagons flow past them, parting like a river around boulders. The cauliflower growths of fa’ gan fringe scar the beggars’ noses and mouths. Betel nut stains blacken their teeth. Anderson reaches into his pocket and tosses cash at their feet, nodding slightly at their wais of thanks as he glides past.
A short while later, the whitewashed walls and alleys of the farang manufacturing district come into view. Warehouses and factories all packed together along with the scent of salt and rotting fish. Vendors scab along the alley lengths with bits of tarping and blankets spread above to protect them from the hammer blast of the sun. Just beyond, the dike and lock system of King Rama XII’s seawall looms, holding back the weight of the blue ocean.
It’s difficult not to always be aware of those high walls and the pressure of the water beyond. Difficult to think of the City of Divine Beings as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen. But the Thais are stubborn and have fought to keep their revered city of Krung Thep from drowning. With coal-burning pumps and leveed labor and a deep faith in the visionary leadership of their Chakri Dynasty, they have so far kept at bay that thing which has swallowed New York and Rangoon, Mumbai and New Orleans.
Lao Gu forges down an alley, ringing his bell impatiently at the coolie laborers who clot the artery. WeatherAll crates rock on brown backs. Logos for Chaozhou Chinese kink-springs, Matsushita anti-bacterial handlegrips, and Bo Lok ceramic water filters sway back and forth, hypnotic with shambling rhythm. Images of the Buddha’s teachings and the revered Child Queen splash along the factory walls, jostling with hand-painted pictures of muay thai matches past.
The SpringLife factory rises over the traffic press, a high-walled fortress punctuated by huge fans turning slowly in its upper story vents. Across the soi a Chaozhou bicycle factory mirrors it, and between them, the barnacle accretion of jumbled street carts that always clog around the entrances of factories, selling snacks and lunches to the workers inside.
Lao Gu brakes inside the SpringLife courtyard and deposits Anderson before the factory’s main doors. Anderson climbs down from the rickshaw, grabs his sack of ngaw, and stands for a moment, staring up at the eight-meter wide door
s that facilitate megodont access. The factory ought to be renamed Yates’ Folly. The man was a terrible optimist. Anderson can still hear him arguing the wonders of genehacked algae, digging through desk drawers for graphs and scrawled notes as he protested.
“You can’t prejudge my work just because the Ocean Bounty project was a failure. Properly cured, the algae provides exponential improvements in torque absorption. Forget its calorie potential. Focus on the industrial applications. I can deliver the entire energy storage market to you, if you’ll just give me a little more time. Try one of my demo springs at least, before you make a decision …”
The roar of manufacturing envelops Anderson as he enters the factory, drowning out the last despairing howl of Yates’ optimism.
Megodonts groan against spindle cranks, their enormous heads hanging low, prehensile trunks scraping the ground as they tread slow circles around power spindles. The genehacked animals comprise the living heart of the factory’s drive system, providing energy for conveyor lines and venting fans and manufacturing machinery. Their harnesses clank rhythmically as they strain forward. Union handlers in red and gold walk beside their charges, calling out to the beasts, switching them occasionally, encouraging the elephant-derived animals to greater labor.
On the opposite side of the factory, the production line excretes newly packaged kink-springs, sending them past Quality Assurance and on to Packaging where the springs are palletized in preparation for some theoretical time when they will be ready for export. At Anderson’s arrival on the floor, workers pause in their labors and wai, pressing their palms together and raising them to their foreheads in a wave of respect that cascades down the line.
Banyat, his head of QA, hurries over smiling. He wais.
Anderson gives a perfunctory wai in return. “How’s quality?”
Banyat smiles. “Dee khap. Good. Better. Come, look.” He signals up the line and Num, the day foreman, rings the warning bell that announces full line stop. Banyat motions Anderson to follow. “Something interesting. You will be pleased.”
Anderson smiles tightly, doubting that anything Banyat says will be truly pleasing. He pulls a ngaw out of the bag and offers it to the QA man. “Progress? Really?”
Banyat nods as he takes the fruit. He gives it a cursory glance and peels it. Pops the semi-translucent heart into his mouth. He shows no surprise. No special reaction. Just eats the damn thing without a second thought. Anderson grimaces. Farang are always the last to know about changes in the country, a fact that Hock Seng likes to point out when his paranoid mind begins to suspect that Anderson intends to fire him. Hock Seng probably already knows about this fruit as well, or will pretend when he asks.
Banyat tosses the fruit’s pit into a bin of feed for the megodonts and leads Anderson down the line. “We fixed a problem with the cutting press,” he says.
Num rings his warning bell again and workers step back from their stations. On the third sounding of the bell, the union mahout tap their charges with bamboo switches and the megodonts shamble to a halt. The production line slows. At the far end of the factory, industrial kink-spring drums tick and squeal as the factory’s flywheels shed power into them, the juice that will restart the line when Anderson is done inspecting.
Banyat leads Anderson down the now silent line, past more wai-ing workers in their green and white livery, and pushes aside the palm oil polymer curtains that mark the entrance to the fining room. Here, Yates’ industrial discovery is sprayed with glorious abandon, coating the kink-springs with the residue of genetic serendipity. Women and children wearing triple-filter masks look up and tear away their breathing protection to wai deeply to the man who feeds them. Their faces are streaked with sweat and pale powder. Only the skin around their mouths and noses remains dark where the filters have protected them.
He and Banyat pass through the far side and into the swelter of the cutting rooms. Temper lamps blaze with energy and the tide pool reek of breeding algae clogs the air. Overhead, tiered racks of drying screens reach the ceiling, smeared with streamers of generipped algae, dripping and withering and blackening into paste in the heat. The sweating line techs are stripped to nearly nothing—just shorts and tanks and protective head gear. It is a furnace, despite the rush of crank fans and generous venting systems. Sweat rolls down Anderson’s neck. His shirt is instantly soaked.
Banyat points. “Here. See.” He runs his finger along a disassembled cutting bar that lies beside the main line. Anderson kneels to inspect the surface. “Rust,” Banyat murmurs.
“I thought we inspected for that.”
“Saltwater.” Banyat smiles uncomfortably. “The ocean is close.”
Anderson grimaces at the dripping algae racks overhead. “The algae tanks and drying racks don’t help. Whoever thought we could just use waste heat to cure the stuff was a fool. Energy efficient my ass.”
Banyat gives another embarrassed smile, but says nothing.
“So you’ve replaced the cutting tools?”
“Twenty-five percent reliability now.”
“That much better?” Anderson nods perfunctorily. He signals to the tool leader and the man shouts out through the fining room to Num. The warning bell rings again and the heat presses and temper lamps begin to glow as electricity pours into the system. Anderson shies from the sudden increase in heat. The burning lamps and presses represent a carbon tax of fifteen thousand baht every time they begin to glow, a portion of the Kingdom’s own global carbon budget that SpringLife pays handsomely to siphon off. Yates’ manipulation of the system was ingenious, allowing the factory to use the country’s carbon allocation, but the expense of the necessary bribes is still extraordinary.
The main flywheels spin up and the factory shivers as gears beneath the floor engage. The floorboards vibrate. Kinetic power sparks through the system like adrenaline, a tingling anticipation of the energy about to pour into the manufacturing line. A megodont screams protest and is lashed into silence. The whine of the flywheels rises to a howl, and then cuts off as joules gush into the drive system.
The line boss’ bell rings again. Workers step forward to align the cutting tools. They’re producing two-gigajoule kink-springs, and the smaller size requires extra care with the machinery. Further down the line, the spooling process begins and the cutting press with its newly repaired precision blades rises into the air on hydraulic jacks, hissing.
“Khun, please.” Banyat motions Anderson behind a protection cage.
Num’s bell rings a final time. The line grinds into gear. Anderson feels a brief thrill as the system engages. Workers crouch behind their shields. Kink-spring filament hisses out from alignment flanges and threads through a series of heated rollers. A spray of stinking reactant showers the rust-colored filament, greasing it in the slick film that will accept Yates’ algae powder in an even coat.
The press slams down. Anderson’s teeth ache with the crush of weight. The kink-spring wire snaps cleanly and then the severed filament is streaming through the curtains and into the fining room. Thirty seconds later it reemerges, pale gray and dusty with the algae-derived powder. It threads into a new series of heated rollers before being tortured into its final structure, winding in on itself, torquing into a tighter and tighter curl, working against everything in its molecular structure as the spring is tightened down. A deafening shriek of tortured metal rises. Lubricants and algae residue shower from the sheathing as the spring is squeezed down, spattering workers and equipment, and then the compressed kink-spring is being whisked away to be installed in its case and sent on to QA.
A yellow LED flashes all-clear. Workers dash out from their cages to reset the press as a new stream of rust-colored metal hisses out of the bowels of the tempering rooms. Rollers chatter, running empty. Stoppered lubricant nozzles cast a fine mist into the air as they self-cleanse before the next application. The workers finish aligning the presses then duck again behind their barriers. If the system breaks, the kink-spring filament will become a high energ
y blade, whipping uncontrollably through the production room. Anderson has seen heads carved open like soft mangoes, the shorn parts of people and the Pollock-spatter of blood that comes from industrial system failures—
The press slams down, clipping another kink-spring among the forty per hour that now, apparently, will have only a seventy-five percent chance of ending up in a supervised disposal fill at the Environment Ministry. They’re spending millions to produce trash that will cost millions more to destroy—a double-edged sword that just keeps cutting. Yates screwed something up, whether by accident or by spiteful sabotage, and it’s taken more than a year to realize the depths of the problem, to examine the algae baths that breed the kink-springs’ revolutionary coatings, to rework the corn resins that enclose the springs’ gear interfaces, to change the QA practices, to understand what a humidity level that hovers near one hundred percent year-round does to a manufacturing process conceptualized in drier climes.
A burst of pale filtering dust kicks into the room as a worker stumbles through the curtains from the fining chamber. His dark face is a sweat-streaked combination of grit and palm-oil spray. The swinging curtains reveal a glimpse of his colleagues encased in pale dust clouds, shadows in a snowstorm as the kink-spring filament is encased in the powder that keeps the springs from locking under intense compression. All that sweat, all those calories, all that carbon allotment—all to present a believable cover for Anderson as he unravels the mystery of nightshades and ngaw.
A rational company would shut down the factory. Even Anderson, with his limited understanding of the processes involved in this next-generation kink-spring manufacture would do so. But if his workers and the unions and the white shirts and the many listening ears of the Kingdom are to believe that he is an aspiring entrepreneur, the factory must run, and run hard.
Anderson shakes Banyat’s hand and congratulates him on his good work.
It’s a pity, really. The potential for success is there. When Anderson sees one of Yates’ springs actually work, his breath catches. Yates was a madman, but he wasn’t stupid. Anderson has watched joules pour out of tiny kink-spring cases, ticking along contentedly for hours when other springs wouldn’t have held a quarter of the energy at twice the weight, or would simply have constricted into a single molecularly bound mass under the enormous pressure of the joules being dumped into them. Sometimes, Anderson is almost seduced by the man’s dream.
Windup Girl Page 2
