mystery. Home to MythTech, who guides our hands through supermarket freezers toward rising-crust pizzas and breadcrumbed mozzarella sticks that seem overpriced and skimpy, but what the hell. It’s our money. We’ll spend it as we please.
I want to be in on that thing, whatever it is. To be safe from them one must be one of them. We dock with the Jetway and I join the line. It’s not a job I’m seeking, it’s citizenship, a seat inside the Dome. Key modules in the canopy hang from cranes and not every duct is flanged and sealed, but unless I get in before the structure’s dedicated, I’ll be a spectator. A mark. If MythTech turns out to be seven twenty-five-year-olds shooting wastebasket hoops and munching protein bars, I’ll still want in, if this is where it’s going. Even the big stuff starts in the Garage.
Sam lets me call him Sam. I ride up front with him. He’s not a veteran, like Driver, but he tries, and I suspect he bills clients electronically and doesn’t grant show tickets on the honor system. He’s in college, no doubt, and this is just a sideline; that Penguin Classics
Someone must want me to feel at home in Omaha, and just in case Sam is reporting back to him, I show interest in salvaged toolworks and thoughtful greenways and redbrick loft districts zoned for art. I’m restless, though. We’re leaving downtown along the sluggish Missouri. Paddle-wheel casinos, stacked raw lumber, the home of the nine-dollar T-bone, the eight, the seven. Big dreams and low rents can make beautiful music together, but as the steak dinners give way to dollar Buds, I start to wonder. Does MythTech have no pride?
“Where’s world headquarters?”
“For what?” Sam says. “They gave me an address, not a press release.”
Low pay, long hours. I don’t take his snapping personally.
He looks from side to side, then at the sky, his chin out over the steering wheel. He’s lost. Searching the sky while driving on the ground is like kicking the dropped fly ball that ended the game.
“Did they give you a time to get me there?” I say.
“In my glove compartment there’s a phone.”
Sam dials yet keeps driving; I lose faith in him. Once in the soup, persistence is no virtue. Muffler shops now. Unaffiliated churches. A Dairy Queen rival from the early seventies with a listing discolored cone that doesn’t spin. MythTech hired this car, and by a firm’s subcontractors you shall know its soul.
“We passed it. I knew it!”
Sam’s illegal U-turn ends at an old low warehouse that I’ll admit has definite rock-and-roll capitalism potential but could use a few satellite dishes on the roof to close the deal. I open my door; I wish I’d kept my briefcase. Sam tells me he needs to deliver a late tuition payment but promises to be back within the hour.
The intercom panel beside the vault-like door is promisingly rich in lighted buttons but none of them are labeled or even numbered. I hold them down four at a time and in response a buzzer sounds and a hidden latch clunks open. I snatch at the door handle, having never been told how long to expect such bolts to stay retracted. It’s always a panic, this moment, for us nervous types.
The space is well-lit thanks to banks of vintage skylights honeycombed with reinforcing wires and remarkably free of bird droppings and dust. There’s an old-fashioned gallery or mezzanine of frosted-glass offices served by iron stairways that horseshoes around what must have been the floor of some grand factory from Omaha’s golden age as a center of whatever industry—boilermaking?—that survives in the names of its high school football teams. But there’s no one around and no visible reception center where one might inquire where they’ve gone. The rough plank floor is as empty as a rink and hasn’t been lovingly sanded and refinished to the customary retro luster or painted with foul lines to afford young geniuses those crucial brainstorming games of lunch-break basketball without which there’d be no Internet, no HandStar.
The only object evoking work or purpose is a sheet metal cube painted army surplus green and the size of an industrial air conditioner. It’s featureless, with no rivets or vents or panels, but the sheen coming off it suggests it’s well maintained. It’s evidence of my investment in MythTech’s legend that despite a stint in a high-tech field that taught me what supercomputers really look like—nothing much; they’re no bigger than a dishwasher—I insist on seeing the cube as a huge cyber-brain capable of predicting how and when America’s recently rekindled romance with the traditional station wagon will end. It’s a drab-olive thinking monolith, that thing.
“Hello down there. Can I help you?”
“It’s Ryan Bingham!”
The man at the rail of the mezzanine withdraws into the warren of glass offices and out pops a new face, young but very pale. The kid has on an orange Hawaiian shirt that’s probably an expensive tribute to the Hawaiian shirt of old, since this one is louder and busier and brighter than any I ever saw my father wear at his annual company picnic in the Lion’s Park. The kid’s wearing flip-flop sandals, too. Encouraging. This is the look of the new- class robber barons.
“Can I help you?” Same question, but spoken with more authority, even a faint ring of profit participation. The kid considers this strange domain his own.
“This is MythTech, isn’t it?” I say.
“Sure is. I’m sorry, though—no more odd jobs. We finished the packing and loading two days ago. Are you from Manpower?”
“I’m dressed like I’m from Manpower? Is Spack or Sarrazin here? It’s Ryan Bingham.”
“They’re already up in Calgary,” he says. Why won’t he come down the stairs and make this civilized? “It’s just me and four temps and two security guys until we can hoist that thing there on a truck. Then we’re gone, too. Are you the one I sent the Town Car for?”
“Someone did. That was you?”
“I got a call from one of our old backers,” the kid shouts down. “Send a car to meet a plane, he said, and when I asked why and who for the guy got snippy and told me I’m too low to ask him questions. I had to remind the old snot we’re not top-down here. We’re horizontal.”
