Up in the Air

“Sandy Pinter?”

“One of those guys with all the wrong old concepts, the ones that put General Motors in the tank.”

“Pinter’s a MythTech backer?”

“From the old days. He got in early third quarter of ’98. You haven’t said how I can help you yet. Adam called you out here?”

“Indirectly.”

“Back-channel stuff?”

“Right.”

“It’s all back channel lately. Did they contact you via microwave or radar? Or AM radio?”

This is not a high point in my life. I’m being teased by a mental inferior who thinks that America didn’t get off the ground until September 1999, or whenever he opened his first IRA. But I deserve his jeers. What do I tell him? That they summoned me on an airport loudspeaker using a mini-mart pay phone?

“What’s in Calgary?”

“Tax breaks. Lax accounting standards. Who knows? Strict banking privacy laws. Skilled immigrants. It’s not like we’re quarrying Nebraska sandstone—we can run this shop from Djakarta.” He snaps his fingers and the echo pings around the space. “Unless you can tell me how to be of service, though, I’ve got an office swamped with cords and cables that need some pretty serious untangling.”

“The name Ryan Bingham means nothing to you?” I say.

“Right now it means frustration. An hour ago I probably would’ve thought it was my senator. I mean it: I have big-time wire to spool, a jumbo commercial coffeemaker to clean. I also have two large guards on antipsychotics. Insanity defense? They’ve got it memorized.”

“What’s your name? I’m going to write it down.”

“I can give you my log-in. I go by that,” he says. “2BZ2CU.”

I shift my center of gravity toward the door, but technically I hold my ground. I glance at the cube; it pulsed just now. It scanned me. I have sensitive mitochondria, rubbed raw by X-rays. I know when I’ve been scanned.

“I came to see that,” I say, pointing. “Over there. My assistant took Sarrazin’s call. He screwed the dates up. I worked on its prototype in Colorado.”

The young man cocks his body skeptically and folds his thin white arms. He’s bluff, all bluff, just another Starbucks M.B.A.; a fashion-forward brat in a VW who probably says he admires the Dalai Lama, but inside he’s all stock options, all wireless day trades. I’ve felt these kindergartners at my back for going on a decade, and they scare me. Time to confront that. Kid doesn’t know crap. Suspects he’s not going to Calgary, either, I bet. These outfits don’t go cross-border and non-dollar so they can haul along their slacker trash.

This needn’t be pure humiliation, this errand. I can alpha this geek and exit in big black boots. So no one here was expecting me? That happens. I’m used to it by now. But I can at least view the cube and ride off tall into my million-mile sunset flight.

“Professional courtesy call,” I say. “Get down here. Give me a tour or Pinter’s calling Spack and Spack’ll pay your severance in rubles.”

2BZ shows Ryan his downy throat. He hits the stairs and flip-flops down in quick-time. The skylights dim as clouds slide over the sun but the cube holds its own in the gloom. It’s homeostatic. 2BZ sets us up at a distance from the thing and won’t fully face it; he just gives it his profile. He’s acting like he’s wishing for a lead apron.

“Is it turned on?” I say.

“Huh? It’s always ‘on.’ ”

“On inside quotation marks?”

“I’m really not the expert,” says 2BZ. “We work on a need-to-know basis in this firm. It’s horizontal, but layered-horizontal. I’m infrastructure. I’m shipping and receiving. I can tell you it’s insured and that it’s fragile and that it travels on a special flatbed that should have been here half an hour ago. I can tell you they already got in touch with Customs and that it wasn’t your shortest phone call ever. I think they made two calls, in fact.”

“So what’s its nickname? Around the central office?”

“This was the back office. People work at home. This place was mostly support and storage,” he says. “I’m not sure I have a job once it’s cleared out. Who do you work for?”

“Myself. Like everyone. So basically you’re ancillary and clueless.”

“They told me I was critical. You smoke? Mind if I do?”

2BZ hand-rolls one from a pouch too fragrant to hold mere tobacco. Cloves or dope? These kids smoke all sorts of mixtures, and they should know better. I ask for one, too, but I won’t inhale, just steep myself. I’ve worn a few Hawaiian shirts myself.

“I do have a few ideas about it,” he says. “It’s pretty skeletal here, there’s not much company, just FedEx and UPS, so I spin out sometimes. Whole place was wired for sound once. Sequenced amps. I pirated off the Net and blasted everything. Tried to see if I could break those skylights. Or get myself fired. You know how all the shrinks say that children now are crying out for firmness and discipline and clear-cut values? I think it’s true. I always got positive evaluations, but what I wanted was someone to storm in here and kill the music and kick a little butt.”

“What ideas?” I’m inhaling some. You think you won’t, but in practice it’s hard not to. Just three hundred more miles to go, so I deserve it. Forty thousand feet above the wheat, and no one will even look up. As long as I know.

“It’s the world-record random automated dialer. It skims off the fractional cents from savings accounts and forwards them to some bank in the Grand Caymans. It’s where erased voice mails end up.”