'If you'd seen the article in
'Well, it'd be fun to see it,' Randy says.
'Notice how well-paved my street is?' Chester says sourly, half an hour later. Randy has parked his hammered and scraped Acura in the guest parking lot of Chester's house and Chester has parked his 1932 Dusenberg roadster in the garage, between a Lamborghini and some other vehicle that would appear to be literally an aircraft, built to hover on ducted fans.
'Uh, I can't say that I did,' Randy says, trying not to gape at anything. Even the pavement under his feet is some kind of custom-made mosaic of Penrose tiles. 'I sort of vaguely remember it as being broad and flat and not having any chuckholes. Well-paved, in other words.'
'This,' Chester says, head-faking towards his house, 'was the first house to trigger the LOHO.'
'LOHO?'
'The Ludicrously Oversized Home Ordinance. Some malcontents rammed it through the city council. You get these, like cardiovascular surgeons and trust-fund parasites who like to have big nice houses, but God forbid some dirty hacker should try to build a house of his own, and send a few cement trucks down their street occasionally.'
'They made you repave the street?'
'They made me repave half the fucking town,' Chester says. 'I mean, some of the neighbors were griping that the house was an eyesore, but after we got off on the wrong foot my attitude was, to hell with 'em.' Indeed, Chester's house does resemble nothing so much as a regional trucking hub with a roof made entirely of glass. He waves his arm down a patchily turfed slab of mud that slopes down into Lake Washington. 'Obviously the landscaping hasn't even begun yet. So it looks like a science fair project on erosion.'
'I was going to say the Battle of the Somme,' Randy says.
'Not as good an analogy because there are no trenches,' Chester says. He is still pointing down towards the lake. 'But if you look near the waterline you can just make out some railroad ties, half-buried. That's where we laid the tracks.'
'Tracks?' Amy says, the only word she's been able to get out of her mouth since Randy drove his Acura through the main gate. Randy told her, on the way over here, that if he, Randy, had a hundred thousand dollars for every order of magnitude by which Chester's net worth currently exceeds his, then he (Randy) would never have to work again. This turned out to be more clever than informative, and so Amy was not prepared for what they have found here and is still steepling her eyebrows.
'For the locomotive,' Chester says. 'There are no railway lines nearby, so we barged the locomotive in and then winched it up a short railway into the foyer.'
Amy just scrunches up her face, silent.
'Amy hasn't seen the articles,' Randy says.
'Oh! Sorry,' Chester says, 'I'm into obsolete technology. The house is a museum of dead tech. Stick your hand into these things.'
Lined up before the front entrance are four waist-high pedestals, emblazoned with the Novus Ordo Seclorum eyeball/pyramid logo, with outlines of hands stenciled onto their lids, and knobs in the lagoons between the fingers. Randy fits his hand into place and feels the knobs slide in their grooves, reading and memorizing the geometry of his hand. 'The house knows who you are now,' Chester says, typing their names into a ruggedized, weatherproofed keyboard, 'and I'm giving you a certain privilege constellation that I use for personal guests-now you can come in through the main gate and park your car and wander around the grounds whether or not I'm home. And you can enter the house if I'm home, but if I'm not home, it'll be locked to you. And you can wander freely in the house except for certain offices where I keep proprietary corporate documents.'
'You have your own company or something?' Amy says weakly.
'No. After Randy and Avi left town, I dropped out of college and snagged a job with a local company, which I still have,' Chester says.
The front door, a translucent crystal slab on a track, slides open. Randy and Amy follow Chester into his house. As advertised, there is a fullscale steam locomotive in the foyer.
'The house is patterned after flex-space,' Chester says.
'What's that?' Amy asks. She is completely turned off by the locomotive.
'A lot of high-tech companies get started in flex-space, which just means a big warehouse with no internal walls or partitions-just a few pillars to hold up the ceiling. You can drag partitions around to divide it up into rooms.'
'Like cubicles?'
'Same idea, but the partitions go up higher so you have a feeling of being in a real room. Of course, they don't go all the way up to the ceiling. Otherwise, there wouldn't be room for the TWA.'
'The what?' Amy asks. Chester, who is leading them into the maze of partitions, answers the question by tilting his head back and looking straight up.
The roof of the house is made entirely of glass, held up by a trusswork of white painted steel tubes. It is maybe forty or fifty feet above the floor. The partitions rise to a height of maybe twelve feet. In the gap above the partitions and below the ceiling, a grid has been constructed, a scaffolding of red pipes, nearly as vast as the house itself. Thousands, millions, of aluminum shreds are trapped in that space grid, like tom tufts caught in a three- dimensional screen. It looks like an artillery shell the length of a football field that has exploded into shrapnel a microsecond ago and been frozen in place; light filters through the metal scraps, trickles down bundles of shredded wiring and glances flatly off the crusts of melted and hardened upholstery. It is so vast and so close that when Amy and Randy first look up at it they flinch, expecting it to fall on them. Randy already knows what it is. But Amy has to stare at it for a long time, and prowl from room to room, viewing it from different angles, before it takes shape in her mind, and becomes recognizable as something familiar: a 747.
'The FAA and NTSB were surprisingly cool about it,' Chester muses. 'Which makes sense. I mean, they've reconstructed this thing in a hangar, right? Dredged up all the pieces, figured out where they go, and hung them on this grid. They've gone over it and gathered all the forensic evidence they could find, hosed out all the human remains and disposed of them properly, sterilized the debris so that the crash investigation team doesn't have to worry about getting AIDS from touching a bloody flange or something. And they're done with it. And they're paying like rent on this hangar. They can't throw it away. They have to store it somewhere. So all I had to do was get the house certified as a federal warehouse, which was a pretty easy legal hack. And if there's a lawsuit, I have to let the lawyers in to go over it. But really it was not a problem to do this. The Boeing guys love it, they're over here all the time.'
'It's like a resource to them,' Randy guesses.
'Yeah.'
'You like to play that role.'
'Sure! I have defined a privilege constellation specifically for engineer types who can come here anytime they want to access the house as a museum of dead tech. That's what I mean by the flex space analogy. To me and my guests, it's a home. To these visitors . . . there's one right there.' Chester waves his arm across the room (it is a central room maybe fifty meters on a side) at an engineer type who has set up a Hasselblad on a huge tripod and is pointing it straight up at a bent landing gear strut '. . . to them it's exactly like a museum in that there are places they can go and other places that if they step over the line will set off alarms and get them in trouble.'
'Is there a gift shop?' Amy jokes.
'The gift shop is roughed in, but not up and running-the LOHO throws up all kinds of impediments,' Chester grumbles.
They end up in a relatively cozy glass-walled room with a view across the churned mud to the lake. Chester fires up an espresso machine that looks like a scale model of an oil refinery and generates a brace of lattes. This room happens to be underneath the TWA's left wing tip, which is relatively intact. Randy realizes, now, that the entire plane has been hung in a gentle banking attitude, like it's making an imperceptible course change, which is not really appropriate; a vertical dive would make more sense, but then the house would have to be fifty stories
