Hearing my accent, she switched to English.
“How may I help you?”
“I have a three o’clock appointment with Susanne Jean.”
“Please have a seat. It won’t be a moment.” She picked up and spoke into a receiver.
In less than a minute Susanne appeared and crooked a finger at me.
She was about my weight, but stood a full head taller. Her skin was eggplant, her hair plaited into a trellis pattern for three inches around her face. In back it hung in long, black cornrows, bundled together with a tangerine binder. As usual, Susanne looked more like a fashion model than an industrial engineer.
I followed her back into the lobby, then through a second set of double doors opposite the main entrance. We crossed a room filled with machines. Several white-coated workers adjusted dials, studied monitors, or stood watching the technology do whatever it did. The air was packed with muted whirs, hums, and clicks.
Susanne’s office was as sleek as the rest of the plant, with bare white walls and straight teak lines. A single watercolor hung behind her desk. One orchid in a crystal bud vase. One detached petal. One perfect water droplet.
Susanne liked things clean. Like me, she held title to a messy past. Like me she’d done serious tidying up.
While my drug of choice had been alcohol, Susanne’s was coke. Though neither of us belonged to the organization, we’d met through a mutual friend who was an AA zealot. That was six years ago. We’d kept in touch, periodically attending a meeting with our common link, or getting together on our own for dinner or tennis. I knew little about her world, she less about mine, but somehow we clicked.
Susanne lowered herself onto one end of an apricot couch, and crossed legs that were at least twelve yards long. I took the other end.
“What do you do for Bombardier?” I asked.
“We’re prototyping plastic parts.”
“Volvo?”
“Metal bearings.”
Manufacturing is as mysterious to me as the Okeefenokee. Raw materials go in. Weedwhackers, Q-tips, or Buicks come out. What happens in between, I haven’t a clue.
“I know you take CAD data and create solid objects, but I’ve never really known what kinds of objects,” I said.
“Functional plastic and metal parts, casting patterns, and durable metal mold inserts.”
“Oh.”
“Did you bring the CT scans?” I handed her Fereira’s envelope. She withdrew the contents and began going through the films, holding them up as Fereira had done. Now and then a film bent, making a sound like distant thunder.
“This should be fun.”
“Without getting technical, what will you do?”
“We’ll make an STL file of your 3-D CAD data, then—”
“STL?”
“Stereolithography. Then we’ll enter the STL file into our system.”
“One of those machines out there?”
“Right. The machine will spread a thin layer of powdered material across a build platform. Using data from the STL file, a CO2 laser will draw a cross-section of the object, in your case a skull, on the layer of powder, then sinter—”
“Sinter?”
“Selectively heat and fuse it. That will create a solid mass representing one cross-section of the skull. The system will spread and sinter, layer after layer, until the skull is complete.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. When the skull is done, we’ll take it out of the build chamber and blow away any loose powder. You’ll be able to use it as is, or it can be sanded, annealed, coated, or painted.”
I was right. Stuff in. Stuff out. In this case what would go in was information taken from Fereira’s CT scan. What would come out was a cast of the Paraiso skull. I hoped.
“The technology’s called SLS, Selective Laser Sintering.”
“Besides metal bearings and plastic parts, what else do you make?”
“Pump impellers, electrical connectors, halogen lamp housings, automotive turbocharger housing units, brake fluid reservoir parts—”
“O-rings for the Orion nebula.”
We both laughed.
“How long will it take?”
