01.
The cold recessed lights of Mr. Thorne’s office felt less like illumination and more like radiation. They bounced off his massive glass desk, highlighting the immaculate, dustless surface between them with bluish specular brilliance.
Roland sat rigidly in the guest chair, his breathing shallow. A cold prickle of sweat beaded under his arms, thankfully out of view.
“Roland,” Mr. Thorne said, his voice a perfect, modulated baritone of corporate disappointment. “You’re now over three weeks behind the project timeline. And this is after the revisions we had to make last month. What exactly are you doing down in the lab? Is the Cooper system finally working?”
Roland swallowed hard. “I’ve made good progress on the quantum Koopman operator array. The architecture itself appears to be stable. It’s more efficient than ever before—actually, we’ve achieved a 4x reduction in power draw from last month—and it’s far more compact now. I discovered that reconfiguring the parallel arrays can re—“
“Great!” Mr. Thorne interrupted. “Wonderful! Does it decrypt the client test data?”
“Umm, sort of? It’s a bit more complicated than—“
“Don’t bullshit me, Roland. You know how important this is to the company. If we can’t deliver a working prototype within five months, we’ll never get another federal contract again. They’ll put us on the exclusion list and debar us. That’s why we recruited you—you committed to this!”
“Yes, I understand, sir.” Inside the right pocket of his anti-static smock, Roland’s fingers were wrapped around the smooth, milled aluminum casing of the latest prototype. It had taken months of engineering and late-night circuit design to refine it to its current alternate form. “I do think it’s working. But maybe differently than we expected.”
“What the fuck does that mean, Roland? Does it decrypt the client data? Yes or no.”
This was the part of the meeting Roland had been dreading all week. But there was no way to avoid it any longer. It had to be done—he had to find out. In his pocket, he gently flicked the toggle switch with his thumb while maintaining eye contact with Mr. Thorne. The now-familiar electrical tingling traced up his fingers and into his forearm. His plan bifurcated into two conditional pathways, and he was about to find out which one would execute.
Mr. Thorne stared at him blankly. Roland swallowed instinctively to pop his ears against a sudden change in barometric pressure—like an airplane beginning its descent. Across the desk, Thorne didn’t flinch. Against his thigh, Roland could already feel the prototype heating up through two layers of fabric.
“Sir, I’m not sure a binary response can accurately describe the situation,” Roland finally said, moving his chair a foot to the left with both hands.
Mr. Thorne continued to stare at Roland’s previous location. A barely perceptible shimmer surrounded Thorne’s face. The fine lines on his forehead had vanished, and his skin looked unusually pale and shiny, like a plastic doll’s complexion.
“Sir, do you have any thoughts on how we should proceed?” Roland asked. “Regarding the project deadline?” He chose his words carefully in case the meeting was being recorded. He suspected it might be—Thorne was exactly the kind of asshole who would.
Nothing. Zero reaction. Mr. Thorne’s jaw hung slack in a frozen stupefied state. Just as Roland had feared. Through the glass wall, a secretary walked by in the hallway, holding a coffee in each hand—blissfully unaffected outside the device’s effective radius. Prolonging the experiment would only increase the risk of burning his thigh for no additional data. Roland reached into his pocket and flicked the toggle off by its plastic tip, carefully avoiding the hot metal casing.
Mr. Thorne’s head snapped toward him, his eyes glaring with overt hostility. “Yes or no, Roland, yes or no?” Roland watched the chromatic reds abruptly render back into Mr. Thorne’s face, followed instantly by the deep, angry furrows in his forehead. Full resolution. This was the eighth time Roland had witnessed the process in a human being and it still elicited a revulsion so strong he nearly puked on Thorne’s office carpet.
“No,” Roland managed. “I’m no longer confident that I will be able to meet the specs. I am very sorry.”
“You useless piece of shit!” Thorne surged from his chair, jabbing a finger across the desk. “I knew you were stringing me along! You’re fired! You get nothing. No completion bonus, and I’m withholding your latest invoice for review. I will have your research audited! If I find out you’ve defrauded us, you’ll be hearing from our attorneys!”
“Fine,” Roland said, his voice completely flat. A lawsuit was about the only thing he wasn’t worried about right now. “I meticulously documented all my work. It’s all in the system. Anyone who takes a look at it will have a huge head-start compared to when I came onboard.”
“Get security to my office now!” Mr. Thorne spat into his desk phone. “I need Roland Griggs escorted from the building immediately—he is no longer employed here.” He smashed the phone back down in the cradle. A thick vein pulsed at his temple. His anger seemed entirely disproportionate—a raw, volatile aggression that Roland had also noticed in some others exposed to the prototype.
“I have a few personal items at my desk,” Roland stated softly.
“They’ll be mailed to you!” Mr. Thorne yelled.
Two uniformed Q-Sync security contractors appeared at the glass door seconds later. It was a relief to leave Thorne’s office for the final time. The descent to the lobby was suffocatingly silent. When the elevator doors finally chimed and parted, the guards directed him not toward the revolving glass doors, but toward the reinforced security checkpoint on the right side of the lobby. As he’d feared.
“Badge and all company property, please,” the taller guard said, sliding a gray plastic bin across the laminate counter. “Also empty your pockets. You’ll need to clear the magnetometer before exiting.”
Roland had rehearsed this in his mind dozens of times, but his heart was still racing. He’d never activated the prototype in the proximity of two other people concurrently before, much less in public. But he was already past the point of no return. The device had already cooled down enough to hold without getting burned. His thumb found the toggle switch inside his pocket and flicked it on. He ignored the pressurization sensation and glanced up—both guards were staring blankly past him, caught in a frozen daydream. Safe.
He pulled the warm aluminum block from his pocket and dropped it right into the gray plastic bin. Then he removed his anti-static smock, placed it on the counter, and proceeded to empty his wallet and keys from his other pockets. Neither guard moved an inch. Roland removed his belt too, just to be fully compliant.
Roland quickly scanned his periphery. No one else in the lobby appeared to be looking in their direction. He shoved the plastic bin down the laminate counter and stepped through the magnetometer. Once clear, he reached into the waiting bin and retrieved the prototype, shoving it into his front pants pocket as fast as he could. The active device was already aggressively ramping up heat, the metal casing stinging his fingers. He toggled the switch off before it could sear him.
He didn’t bother looking back. He forced his hands to move smoothly, without trembling, as he retrieved his wallet and keys from the plastic bin. If the plan was going to fail, it was going to be right now. But no one said a word as he threaded his belt back through the belt loops. Maybe each guard thought the other had cleared him. It was difficult to know exactly how the brain bridged the gap. Roland walked casually toward the revolving doors, every passing step reinforcing his confidence. Nobody yelled. No alarm sounded. Outside, the chaotic noise of the city enveloped him and the only evidence left was the warmth dissipating against his thigh.
