Chrysalis

16

In the comfort of his screening room chair, with echoes of the sharp exchange still dying away, Logan snuck a look at the head of VR. Despite what he’d told the anonymous Rosalind, Wrigley showed no signs of moving. He sat quite still, except for his eyes — which glanced here and there at random, seeing but not taking in — and his lips, which moved slightly. Logan realized what the man was doing: he was taking this enormous task he was spearheading — the countless development cycles and beta tests and hardware patches, all the myriad elements that made up the vast rollout due to happen in three days — and mentally rebalancing, making room for this unexpected intrusion.

Abruptly, he jumped to his feet, then beckoned to Logan. “All right,” he said. “Come this way.” He pressed one of several faintly lit buttons in the forward wall, and suddenly — finally — the space beyond the glass came to light. Logan had a glimpse of what looked like a sprawling soundstage, with DV cameras on dollies, blue screens, body mirrors, clusters of lights, and long lines of marking tape running across the floor. But then he had to hurry, because Wrigley had already walked away and opened a door beside the wall of glass.

“Claire?” he said. “He’ll get his demo. But without all that foreplay I gave the board — no PowerPoint deck, no four-color printouts.”

“Then I’ll see myself out,” Asperton replied with a nod. “Jeremy, when you’re finished here, please get in touch.”

Logan nodded. Then he turned and followed Wrigley as the man trotted out onto the polished wooden floor of the soundstage. As he did so, a door in the far wall — comically small, given the height of the ceiling — opened and a woman in jeans and a white turtleneck stepped through it. She had a tablet with a digital stylus in one hand.

“Matthew,” she began as she approached, “what’s up —?”

“Roz,” he interrupted, “no time for questions. I need you to spin up the demo cage for this guy.” And Wrigley jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward Logan.

The woman looked from Wrigley to Logan and back again. “Now? But we’re starting the stress test on the—”

“Push it back half an hour. And the final code review, as well. We’ll plan to go gold at five instead of four.”

“But—” Rosalind cut herself off, realizing silence was the more prudent course.

“I know it’s a pain in the ass,” Wrigley said. “Just get some people to the cage, so we’ll be ready to give Logan here the same tour the board got. But without the Two A stuff: we’ll do the dog-and-pony, then hustle him out.”

The woman listened, then nodded and turned away.

The head of VR turned back to Logan. “Best right hand I’ve ever had,” he said. “Her ability to absorb technical and creative details is just about limitless. I hired her while she was walking off the graduation platform at MIT. If I croaked, she could run this place.”

“Is she better than Karel Mossby?” Logan asked.

Wrigley’s eyes narrowed. “What does that have to do with you — or this demo?”

“How long since he left your division?”

“Four, maybe five months.” Suddenly, he frowned. “They’re still handing out this junk?” And he summarily plucked the Venture from Logan’s ear and the bridge of his nose; examined it; then tossed it away as distastefully as if he hadn’t designed it himself. “My God. We’re about to storm the Normandy beaches, and you’ve got bows and arrows like it’s the Battle of Agincourt.”

“There’s a pretty good chunk of my life stored in that ‘junk,’ ” Logan said.

“You’ll get it all back, stop worrying. Every last bit, byte, and nibble is stored in… our subbasement server farms. Everything — even that little conversation with Captain Phasma.”

“Claire? She seems pretty pleasant for a bloodthirsty storm trooper.”

“It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for. Come on, damn it: we’re wasting time.” And Wrigley led the way through a soundproofed door and into what seemed to Logan like barely controlled chaos. Instead of the architecturally neutral work environments he’d seen elsewhere, Logan found himself in a huge space occupied by hundreds of people, separated by labyrinthine partitions, six feet high and in a uniform light gray. The entire space was covered by a low, domed ceiling, like a sports arena. The noise level was somewhere between the floor of the stock exchange and a futures market for cattle. Logan registered keyboards tapping, the mingle of countless conversations and arguments, the glow of lasers rising from invisible offices — and below everything, a low hum, as of a dynamo — before he realized that Wrigley had stopped and was tapping him on the shoulder.

“Do you mind?” he asked. And then he turned and started off again, at a pace just short of a jog. Logan concentrated on following him through the confusing maze.

“So they’re really dead?” Wrigley said over his shoulder. “All three?”

“Yes.”

“In the last couple of days?”

Logan nodded again.

“Jesus. And Claire said Spearman was one of them?”

“Yes.”

“Shit.” Wrigley shook his head. “I admired that old man. He knew how to kick ass. Someday I hope to be like him.”

“I’d say you’re off to a good start,” Logan replied.

Wrigley stared back at him. “Start at what?”

“Evolving from a wunderkind-with-an-attitude into an old, admirable ass-kicker.”

As Logan expected, instead of taking offense Wrigley laughed for the first time since they’d met. “High praise, coming from a” — he searched for a suitable epithet — “a ghostbuster.”

So Wrigley had recognized him. “I don’t ‘bust’ ghosts. I find ways to accommodate them. Consider it like a form of arbitration—”

“Goddamn it!” Wrigley erupted suddenly. “You’ve distracted me again. Come on, we’ve wasted enough time as it is.” And, heading down a final cubicle-lined corridor, they reached a metal door. Wrigley pressed his palm against the security reader, then threw the door open and stepped inside, leaving Logan to catch it before it closed.

He found himself in a long hallway, bathed with indirect illumination, as tranquil as the vast R&D area had been frantic. Logan followed, catching only the briefest glimpses of labs and what appeared to be small classrooms before Wrigley opened a door and ushered him inside.

Logan entered, then stopped. The room had linoleum flooring and plain beige walls. There were diagnostic tools along one wall, and a glassed-in booth with a workstation in an opposite corner. A few wheeled devices that looked to Logan like medical trolleys held monitors and various instruments, trailing cables behind them. But what particularly caught his attention was the cage in the center of the room. “Cage,” he decided, was not quite the proper word — it was a grid-like structure of thin strips of nonreflective metal, shaped into a cube-like mesh about eight feet on each side. Small cameras and other lensed devices were fixed to its upper corners. A few action dollies with pneumatic wheels stood here and there, additional video cameras atop them nodding and dark, as if snoozing. For some reason, the room reminded Logan most of a medical lab, where a patient would go to endure a CT scan, angioplasty, or perhaps something worse.

In such an analogy, that made him the patient. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

The woman named Rosalind approached. Logan had not noticed she’d been in the room. Wrigley turned to her. “Set?”

“Repopulating the last few microenvironments. We thought all the demos were finished.”

“They were supposed to be.” Wrigley gestured Logan toward the cage, and a padded, straight-backed chair that sat inside it. “Have a seat.”

“Will it hurt?” Logan asked, a little more plaintively than he’d intended.

“That depends.” This elicited a laugh from Rosalind and a few other techs manning various control panels.

Logan stepped forward, through a hole in the mesh that served as a door. It was low, and since at six foot one he was rather tall, he had to duck. The chair inside reminded Logan of something that would be used for a lie detector — and he gingerly took a seat.

“Green,” said Rosalind.

Wrigley rolled another chair over to the cage, placed it parallel to Logan’s outside the mesh, and sat down. “Plug him in.”