“I suppose so,” he grudgingly acknowledged, “but you better make it quick to minimize the hours billed.”
“If I run into trouble, or if I get a serious problem I can’t handle, I need to be able to contact you,” I pointed out. “It’s OK if I call your cell phone number?”
Mr. Humphreys seemed even less happy about that request. He nodded his assent.
I capitalized on my momentum with him by sharing my analysis on the printers. “I think we can save at least $2,500 a year by running toner cartridges completely out instead of replacing them the first time the printer emails us a ‘low toner’ warning.” I was already thinking how I’d spend my $250 bucks – my 10% cut for a successful suggestion, according to the Employee Handbook.
“Yeah, I saw your email. That just makes more work, though,” Mr. Humphreys pointed out, “having to monitor the levels in detail. You’re making more work for me, once you head back to school. It also means that printers will actually run dry, inconveniencing our users.”
“It’s not that much more work, I countered. “And there are any number of other printers. If one runs dry on a user, they can always use a different one.”
“Time and inconvenience cost money – probably more money than you’d save.” He grunted disapprovingly. “The answer is ‘no.’ Get back to work, and replace all those toner cartridges you should have replaced yesterday.”
I’d hoped to impress Mr. Humphreys with my initiative to persuade him he should take me to Jekyll Island as part of his team. This wasn’t working out the way I hoped. Time for Plan B, the direct approach.
“I understand TAGS has a contract to do network upgrades and IT for the Civic Circle’s Social Justice Leadership Forum this summer on Jekyll Island, and the G-8 Summit a week later on Sea Island. Could you use me on the team?”
“No,” he said, dashing my hopes. “Get back to work.”
I was getting really frustrated. Having just sat through orientation and read the Employee Handbook, I was an expert on the company’s policies. I had one last card to play. On to Plan C.
“You know,” I pointed out, “if I submit my toner savings idea as a formal suggestion, even if you don’t like it, you’re obliged to pass it on to your manager, the VP of Operations. She just told us during orientation that she’s always on the lookout for new ideas to save money. I bet she’d jump on this one.”
He looked at me like a snake eying his prey, got up, and closed his door.
“Yeah, she would,” he glared at me, “and she’d count it against me on my next performance evaluation for not having noticed it first. They always do that with suggestions – they’re a down-check on the department head who was ‘wasting’ money, and they ignore ‘intangibles’ like wasted time, effort, and inconvenience, in favor of what they can quantify, in this case, a couple thousand bucks of extra toner.
“That’s exactly how the previous Chief Operating Officer lost his job. A guy submitted a bunch of suggestions, showed something like a quarter million in direct process cost reductions, and the safety violations totaled up to another quarter million. They count it as a minimum $10,000 savings for every safety-of-life suggestion per person no longer at risk, and hand over a $1,000 check to the person who spotted the problem and made the suggestion. The guy figured out that the overhead crane could drop a load on any of a couple dozen folks working in the assembly building. Let me tell you, the only thing the company hates worse than having to pay to remediate a safety issue is having to fork over a $50,000 check to some smart ass technician who showed he was cleverer than his bosses. They canned the ass of the COO for letting that happen.
“You think I haven’t noticed the printers crying wolf? You have weeks to get around to changing the toner cartridges after the printers start warning you. No one really cares because in the grand scheme of things, the opportunity cost of working around a printer that’s gone dead when you’ve got something important to print, on a deadline maybe, is far more expensive than what you’d save by squeezing the last couple of pennies out of a toner cartridge.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way. He had a point.
“Let me tell you a story,” he began, “about another bright-eyed young engineer who worked hard, and was always looking for an opportunity. After three years of extraordinary service, he applied for a promotion that would have meant a nice raise and recognition for all the hard work and the many nights he’d stayed late fixing the consequences of others’ stupidity. His boss came into his office and said, ‘Your work’s been outstanding, and you’re the best qualified network engineer in the whole company. I have to tell you, though, that the word has come down from on high. We don’t have enough women in senior positions. For the time being, only women are going to get promoted into management around here.’ That young engineer was heartbroken that everything he’d done didn’t matter because of some stupid diversity quota.”
He looked at me and let that sink in. I had a pretty good idea that young engineer was sitting right in front of me.
“So, he found another job at a smaller company that he thought would be less bureaucratic, and he redoubled his effort to make up for the lost time. He was promoted to Director of IT in short order. His work made the difference in landing a couple of big contracts, and he managed them to successful conclusions. He even went to school nights and weekends and picked up an executive MBA. Then, the position of Chief Operating Officer opened up. He had the inside track, and no one else at the company was even remotely as qualified for the job. The CEO came into his office and said, ‘We don’t have enough women in senior positions, and you’re too important to the company in the job you have now.’ The company hired an outsider whose primary qualification – as far as I can tell – is that she’s a woman.”
Mr. Humphreys looked me in the eye and added, “It’s remarkable how liberating it is to realize that there is no correlation between one’s effort and one’s reward.
“Take it easy. Enjoy your summer. I’ll be leaving you in charge of IT for the whole company while I’m on Jekyll Island. You’ll get some great experience and responsibility, and I’ll write you a solid recommendation letter. Or you can try to fuck with me by submitting this crap suggestion, and so help me, I will bury you. What’s it going to be?”
I had to think about that a moment. “I don’t really care for either option you’re offering me. I want to work with you, not screw you over, so I won’t submit the suggestion. I do want to go to Jekyll Island, though. How can we make it happen?”
“We can’t. It ain’t gonna happen. Now go get those toner cartridges replaced, like you should have done yesterday.”
Damn. Strike three and I was out. I grabbed my list of printers and got back to work.
I was replacing the toner cartridge in the printer outside the robotics lab when a familiar man walked by. “Professor Glyer?” I’d inadvertently blurted out his name before I realized it.
“Yes?” He paused to look at me.
Professor Glyer had lured Marlena to the astrophysics conference, GammaCon, in Chattanooga with a promise of a job offer at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, apparently so the Civic Circle could try to poison her. What was he doing here?
“Well, what do you want?”
“Sorry, sir,” I recovered. “I didn’t realize you worked here. I thought you were at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.”
“I left UAH to work at U.S. Robotics last year,” he explained, “and now I’m starting up the Robotics Lab here for TAGS.”
I needed to get out of this discussion before he remembered seeing me at GammaCon in Chattanooga. “Your printer will be ready in just a minute, sir.”
“Thanks.” He continued past me into his lab.
The coincidence troubled me. What were the odds? I mean, Glyer had a tie to Huntsville, but still? And offering Marlena a job in astrophysics at UAH? Not only was he no longer on the faculty, but his work was in robotics, not astrophysics. More pieces of an
unclear puzzle.
The next printer on my list was outside a lab full of hefty spirals of copper tubing and high voltage equipment. In the back of the lab, I saw familiar looking tall things with domes on top. “Are those Tesla Coils?”
“Of a sort,” the man in the lab looked up from his work to answer me. “They’re actually equipment for a Zenneck surface wave launcher.”
“A surface wave?”
He smiled, clearly happy at the opportunity to explain his work. “Most radio waves are ‘space waves.’ Their energy propagates away in all directions over the surface of a sphere around the source. The energy goes as the inverse square of the distance.”
I nodded. That was basic physics.
“A surface wave propagates along the surface – along a plane. The energy is concentrated in the plane, so it propagates over the circumference of a circle. The energy goes as the inverse of the distance instead of the inverse distance square.”
I thought about the implications. “The energy in a surface wave falls off more gradually than in a space wave.”
“Exactly!” he confirmed. “You get much stronger signals with a surface wave than with a space wave.”
That puzzled me. “Why don’t people use surface waves instead of space waves, then?”
“It only really works well at lower frequencies,” he explained. “By the time you get up to the frequencies used in most wireless systems today, the loss in typical ground is so big that you can’t propagate far at all. That’s why you’ve probably never heard of it.”
“Radio started off at low frequencies, though,” I pointed out. “Why didn’t they use the technique in early radio?”
His eyes lit with a passion. “They did. Only, the powers that be suppressed it. Tesla wanted to use surface waves to send wireless power to the world. He got investors, including J.P. Morgan, to fund construction of his Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island in 1901. But then Morgan pulled the plug on the system, so Tesla never got the chance to see if it would work. They dynamited his wonderful tower in 1917 and sold it for scrap to pay his debts.”
Wasn’t Morgan one of the architects of the Federal Reserve? I wondered if I’d just uncovered yet another example of Civic Circle manipulation of science and technology.
“Why didn’t someone else pursue the idea later?”
“They did. The theory was worked out by a brilliant radio engineer, Jonathan Zenneck, in 1906. These surface waves are called ‘Zenneck Waves,’ in his honor. Another famous physicist, Arnold Sommerfeld, worked out the theory of ground waves, confirming Zenneck’s work. The concept was revisited in the 1930s, but yet another radio engineer, a man named Kenneth Norton, convinced everyone that there was a sign error in Sommerfeld’s theory. In the Sommerfeld-Norton theory, the ground waves attenuate quickly and don’t have the marvelous performance Zenneck predicted.”
That name – Kenneth Norton – it seemed vaguely familiar. I had a different question, though. “Why wouldn’t people have noticed that the real world behavior doesn’t match the theory?”
“Most of the time, behavior does match the Sommerfeld-Norton theory. It’s tricky to launch a pure Zenneck wave, but that’s what we’re working on.”
Just then, the helpline phone rang. I had to excuse myself to reset a user’s password. I had a feeling there was something I was missing. It wasn’t just the sheer improbability of it all – yesterday’s lady rocket scientist with an idea to make space elevators obsolete before they had even been invented, and now today, running into Professor Glyer and the guy working on surface waves.
* * *
By the end of my first week, I knew my way around the TAGS campus, and I’d caught up completely with what must have been a month’s backlog of toner requests. It was obvious Mr. Humphreys was only working a couple hours a day at best, and had left all the rest of his duties to me. There wasn’t enough IT work to keep one person fully employed, let alone two.
I’d tried to hang out with the other interns. Unfortunately, they liked to go out for lunch, spending upwards of $10 or more at the West End Grill or one of the other trendy restaurants that catered to the contractors and engineers at the Research Park. I needed to pinch my pennies and save as much as I could for school. I had no guarantee that the scholarship I had through the Social Justice Initiative would continue through my senior year, and I wanted to build up enough of a reserve to finish my studies.
The only other interns with the sense to eat in were Johnny Rice and his new girlfriend, Kirin. It figured that the most attractive girl around would get snapped up like that. They were friendly enough when I joined them for lunch, but it was clear they were really into each other and three was a crowd.
I ate my bag lunch hidden away in the server room and took advantage of Mr. Humphreys’ long lunchtime absences to poke around. I used my administrative superpowers to look into Professor Glyer’s files. He had protected them with encrypted zip files. I copied them off to work on them at home.
The encryption was no problem, because Amit had shared with me a hacking tool he’d found on the dark web. It let you break the zip file encryption if you could guess a plaintext string in the file. I found online where Glyer had published a technical paper while he was at U.S. Robotics, and sure enough, it was one of his zip archives. That got me his password, which was the same one he’d used in all his other zip files.
What I found was fascinating. He’d helped himself to a vast amount of U.S. Robotics “Proprietary and Confidential” information – circuit diagrams, mechanical drawings, build documentation, bills of materials – everything you’d need to build one of their robots. What’s more, I found an archive of his old emails.
Glyer had been specifically paid by TAGS as a “consultant” to attend the GammaCon conference and conduct a phony job interview with Marlena. I couldn’t tell if he knew about the assassination attempt. Perhaps that aspect of the operation had been compartmentalized from him? I was ready to give the man the benefit of the doubt when I came across a host of emails on his plans to “set up a robotics lab” at TAGS.
Glyer and Travis Tolliver, the CEO, were planning to take the designs Glyer had stolen from U.S. Robotics, ship off the mechanical drawings to some Chinese vendors, and produce low-cost knockoffs of U.S. Robotics models. Between the lower production costs and the fact TAGS wasn’t going to have to recoup the engineering cost of creating the designs in the first place, TAGS would make a killing. They even had a big defense contractor lined up to sell robots to the Army for bomb disposal, reconnaissance of caves and tunnels, and other applications, as soon as TAGS completed a prototype run to submit for Army testing.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I found an email Glyer sent to Travis Tolliver, proposing what he called “killbots,” small robotic assassins that could penetrate a secure area, recognize a target, and either shoot them or administer a lethal injection. “Far more secure than relying on outside contractors to poison a bottle of beer! Perhaps our sponsors would be interested in funding a demonstration?”
So Glyer knew exactly what happened at GammaCon, after all. He was an accessory to attempted murder. Now, he was proposing to build and unleash a horde of Chinese killbots on whatever wrong-thinker the Civic Circle decided to target.
My summer to-do list was getting uncomfortably long. Here I was trying to save the world, and I was stuck in Huntsville, Alabama being stymied by a burned out IT guru with a chip on his shoulder. Not only did I have to persuade Mr. Humphreys to let me join the Jekyll Island team, but also I now had to figure out how to stop Glyer’s Chinese killbot army. All I’d accomplished this week only put me further behind.
Chapter 5: …We Go All
“Good to see you,” I greeted Rob as he joined me at the picnic table. It was still early, and not many people were present in Monte Sano State Park, atop the mountain just to the east of town. “Hard to believe it’s only been a week.”
Rob surveyed our surroundings carefully and pulled out a small handheld
radio. He pushed the transmit button twice. A moment later, I heard two clicks in reply. “We’re clear,” he confirmed. “I had the rest of the team show up an hour early to get into position and provide surveillance. Good practice.”
I was impressed. I’d been looking for surveillance, and I hadn’t seen them. Of course, if they’d gotten here first and remained motionless, they’d be next to impossible to spot.
“You’ve been keeping plenty busy,” he grinned. “‘They say you make love with professor twice – once with body, and once with mind.’ Really?”
“If you think you can do better, you’re welcome to take over running Virtual Reka, yourself,” I replied, levelly.
“No way. I bow to the expert. You got that professor of yours hornier than a brass band on the Fourth of July. Nice work. Of course, with a body like Reka’s, no red-blooded man would need much persuasion.”
That was a half-hearted compliment. “Thanks, I guess.” No sense beating around the bush. I had a bone to pick with him. “What’s with running surveillance on me when I met the Red Flower Tong and not clueing me in?”
“Operational security.” He gave his default answer for everything. “What you don’t know, you can’t betray.”
“I seem to recall one of those small-unit tactical books you made me read say that ‘surprise is best reserved for the enemy.’ If things had gone south, don’t you think it would have been a good idea for me to know I had some backup?”
“Old habits die hard, I suppose. I’m used to thinking of you as a kid.” He grinned, sheepishly. “Treating you like one. I default to keeping secrets. Have to in this game if you want to stay alive. You’re right, though. You’re a grownup, too, now. I should have told you.”
I was surprised it was that easy, and he’d been so reasonable. “Thanks,” I nodded my acceptance of the implicit apology.
“I’m sure your father would have had some pithy saying, some words of wisdom to impart, just right for the circumstances.”
The Brave and the Bold Page 9
