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I watch them rolling away.
Damn.
I don’t like them being here. I’ve gotten along so far in life without so-called peers. I have some people I talk to online. Actual humans my own age, really not important.
And yet I almost can’t resist the magnetic pull as they head into the elevator.
The elevator doors slide shut. “Damn,” I say, resisting my desire to punch something.
My phone buzzes with a text. It’s work, of course. It’s not like my twenty closest friends have my number. It’ll be someone needing a doughnut, or a rack of instruments run through the autoclave, or some forgotten thing fetched from a car in the parking lot. In theory it could be one of my online teachers, but that’s unlikely: I keep up with my work. It’s not a strain.
I check my screen. Tattooed Tommy wants a cappuccino and a poppy-seed bagel.
I groan, head to the elevator. I push “7” and I’m whisked to The Meld, the incredible space where the Big Brains hang out. It’s a vast open area—you could park a passenger jet in it—but it’s broken up into pods of moveable workstations. It’s like they took the cubicles from every boring office on earth—one wall, plus a desk and chair and all of that—and rigged them so they could be driven around.
Each workstation has an electric motor and four nylon wheels. They form into groups and they break apart and re-form into different groups. You never know where any of the individual Big Brains might be just by looking, but we have an app that shows current locations. I know, for example, that Tattooed Tommy, the crazy-smart biochemist from Berkeley, is at grid J-7.
In the kitchen, I grab the coffee cart. Caffeine in various forms, organic herbal tea, bagels, muffins, energy bars. This isn’t my job, but I don’t mind covering for the regular dude. There’s no better way to find out what’s going on than by being a peon everyone ignores. If you’re the coffee guy, it’s just assumed that you don’t understand anything you see on the computer screens, holographic displays, and even the occasional old-school chalkboard.
In a place filled with people who think of themselves as Big Brains, a guy dishing out fruit cups is invisible. No one notices when I seem to be checking e-mail on my phone, but I’m actually taking a picture or hitting the “record” voice memo button. I’ve got a pretty good memory, and that helps, too.
I pause and take a swig from my water bottle. Karen, one of the biochem research assistants, grabs a cheese Danish off my cart. “You get a promotion?” she asks.
I shrug, move on, keep my eyes open. It’s hard to steal data here, very hard. But not impossible.
My biggest problem: At Spiker Biopharm, we don’t do cloud.
It’s a security thing. Everyone uploads data to the cloud. That’s where people have their pictures, their tunes, their manuscripts, whatever. But Spiker isn’t “whatever,” so all Spiker data goes strictly to in-house servers.
No CD burners. No USB ports for thumb drives.
Which makes it very complicated for me to steal data. And yet …
There’s a file in the cloud. I’ve encrypted it so heavily the CIA couldn’t break in. People usually use a four- or five-character security code. My code is thirty-two characters long.
I comfort myself with this knowledge as I make my way toward Tommy.
“Bagel and a capp, right?” I ask.
He’s around thirty. Covered in tattoos, everywhere except his hands, neck, and his face. Even his forehead has the word “Pixies”—that’s an alt-rock band—in gothic script.
Tommy thinks of himself as a cool guy. He’s nice to me, in the condescending way that a person who’s always been the smartest guy in the room is nice to someone he sees as inferior.
“Poppy seed?” he asks.
“Poppy seed,” I confirm.
He takes the food, sighs, and shakes his head. “Hey, kid. Have you met the girl?”
I guess what girl he means, but I need to play dumb. “What girl?”
“The kid. The daughter. I don’t know her name.”
“You mean Evening Spiker? Yeah, I met her.”
He looks at me doubtfully. He’s judging whether I can answer his next question. He’s wondering whether even communicating with me is a waste of time.
“What’s the deal with her? She bright? Stupid? What?”
