Cold War Dreams by Carac Allison

Author:Carac Allison [Allison, Carac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: 2016-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37: Artemidorus Tech

Artemidorus Tech occupied a silver tower in San Diego’s burgeoning technology district. The company’s neighbors included Nokia, Qualcomm, and General Atomic. New biotech companies were moving in. The UCLA campus was close.

Security at AT’s entrance was both elaborate and yet strangely improvised—as if new procedures and protocols were being imagined and immediately tried. The security guards seemed to find it all as frustrating as the staff trying to get in. The festive tinsel made the exercise absurdly surreal.

After passing through a metal detector, each of the four teens now on their Christmas break stood while their pictures were taken and saved. They were required to sign single pages that listed their names, their birth dates, the time of their entry, and the anticipated time of their exit. They were then issued ID badges on lanyards with small versions of the pictures just taken and the label of VISITOR.

Victoria’s father led them on the tour himself. He showed them the cubicles the engineers worked in and the meeting rooms in which whiteboards were filled with mind maps and formulas. He introduced and explained a server room. He presented a cleanroom beyond glass in which the assembly of a new hardware prototype was occurring. Walking the halls between these stops, he tried to chat with the teens.

“Victoria tells me you’re like a boss radical hacker.”

Kurt smiled back up at Victoria’s father. The very tall man was clearly a genius, but his attempts at relatable-hip-youth-talk were, like, totally lame.

“I could look at getting you an internship when you’re a little older.”

“Oh thanks, Mr. Grainger. That would be, like, gnarly to the max.”

Mr. Grainger took the four friends to the cafeteria for lunch. He helped them load up their trays, made a ­where’s-the-beef-joke, paid and then left them to eat by themselves at one of the tables. He promised to return within the hour.

“You guys ready for a faster tour?” Victoria revealed her dad’s lifted ID card.

Paul was the only one who’d started eating. They left the food.

Victoria hurried them out of the cafeteria and into the elevator. The numbers for the restricted floors were marked in red. She hit ‘seven’ and then swiped the stolen ID card that authorized the elevator to ascend there.

“Do you know what’s on seven?”

“No idea, but restricted sounds promising.”

The doors opened, and the four moved quickly. They swiped the stolen card on all the locked doors they could find. One such portal opened into a room of empty cubicles. Another into a smaller, server room. Another into an observation deck beyond which was a brighter, but empty cleanroom. In there they saw a machine that seemed like a hybrid of a dentists’ chair and a metal cocoon spun with wires. They imagined how a person would stand/lie in it, where their arms and legs would be restrained, where their head would be supported with pads and crowned with electrical leads.

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