said Cass.
Reggie shook his head. “George? Did George do this do you?”
“Mr. Simon is in the Tomb.”
“Cass, why aren't you feeling well? Was George up to something?”
She shook her head. “I'm just a little sick. It will pass. Mr. Simon is in the Tomb.”
“Okay. If you're sure.” He paused. “Is the report ready on those two from Blue Water?”
A look of horror crossed her face. “I'm sorry. I know how important this is, but I don't know if it's ready. Let me check.” She ran the palm of her hand across her face the way someone might when they have a migraine. “I'm so sorry. Can I get back to you?”
Reggie nodded. “If George has hurt you, I will hurt him.”
“Please don't. You know what he means to me.”
This statement took Reggie by surprise. He'd never heard Cass speak that way before. Binder leaned in and put his face inches from Cass.
“Cass? Just what does he mean to you?”
“I won't let you hurt George. He's my truest friend.”
Reggie slapped the desk. “Great, now I will kill him.”
Binder walked through the inner doors. There was a long hallway, with window offices on the left and a half height wall on the right. A common area extended from the other side of the wall to a group of cubicle offices. Binder removed his shoes and placed them under the couch. This would ensure they were spotless when Dale and Marianne arrived. He left the office and passed the next two, which belonged to his partners. These were Dr Kevin Nagel and Rosalind Munro. Both offices were locked and dark. He expected Rosalind to be a little late, but Nagel's absence annoyed him. Reggie had been calling the man all morning.
Something was wrong. The fire alarm had gone off. There was no sound, but there was a blue light fixed to the ceiling in the common area. It flashed inside a metal cage, silent but persistent.
“George.” said Reggie.
At the end of the hall another door lead into the engineering suite. The door was heavy with a thick window, but Binder could hear the music coming from the other side. He could feel it. Reggie opened the door and walked into a wall made of the sounds of Maria Callas singing the Habanera from Carmen at a volume that shook the walls.
“L'oiseau que tu croyais surprendre...”
There was a collection of tables filled with exposed electronics. Huge sheets of paper covered nearly every wall. Some bore technical drawings and lines of code. Others bore more artistic work in charcoal and colored felt tip pen. The themes of these latter images included stone bulwarks and forests where the trees bled with red blood. One was a human skull marked with words written in many alphabets and languages. Another was a contraption made of wheels within wheels, eyes around the edges and the heads of animals floating above them. On the floor, Reggie saw women's underwear.
“Battit de l'aile et s'envola...”
To the right were heavy doors protecting this work area from the server rooms. Fans and air conditioners hummed from behind them. Reggie swiped his Id badge across a key pad and entered his PIN. The box blinked yellow, indicating that his attempt to unlock the room had failed. Binder tried again and once more the device emitted an angry buzz and blinked yellow. Out of frustration, Reggie yanked on the handle. He almost fell over backwards when the door to his vault of secrets opened without any effort. It hadn't been locked at all.
The first server room was the customer room. The Sorter didn't live here, but that's not what Polymath told its clients. The room contained a glass case filled with black server racks. Each rack featured a narrow strip of blue lights down the center, which pulsed with random patterns to make the federation of about 1000 processors look like they were “thinking”. The glass on the front of the case featured the sphinx logo that Reggie hated. A bank of 50 inch screens covered the upper half of the opposite wall. These were always blank except for demos. During those demos they displayed impressive looking charts of personality traits and trends. This little room did run a subset of the Sorter algorithms, but only enough to impress the riff-raff.
Reggie cursed George again as he went to the next secured door. This time he didn't bother to swipe his card. He hauled the door open and stormed inside. This was the inner sanctum. Few people in the company ever entered here, let alone outsiders. To clients, Reggie referred to it as the Holy of Holies. Among Polymath employees it was known as the Tomb. The Tomb was a massive room. It was so dim it looked like the edge of space. It was also filled with racks, though many more than in the demo room. They each carried four cubes, one stacked on the other. Thin silver strips covered the front of each cube. These strips were the termination of air ducting baffles on the end of processor boards. There were no standard chips here, no operating system of any kind. Rather, each board was an optical interconnect supporting a dozen three dimensional Field Programmable Gate Arrays, all plugged into the high speed switching fabric at the back of each chassis.
Each of these cubes screamed. The FPGAs got so hot that each rack required a bank of powerful fans, all drawing air at a rate proportional to that of a jet engine. It was the cramped spaces, the darkness and that constant banshie wail that earned this place its nickname. Most people thought of tombs as quiet. Perhaps this Tomb is what they would sound like if you could hear the crying of the damned.
Reggie saw George Simon's elbow peeking out from behind one of the racks. He hooked it and dragged the man into the narrow passage between towers rows. George nearly tripped because his pants were around his ankles. As Binder's eyes adjusted he saw that there was woman still in the alcove, skirt pulled up.
“Who's this?” said Binder.
George stretched his neck and looked at the ceiling. Then he reached down to pull up his pants. The programmer was two inches taller than Reggie and half his age. He wore his red hair to his shoulders. His shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a tattoo that read “Vitam regit fortuna non sapientia.” His sleeves were rolled up and Reggie could see puncture wounds on his veins. As George spoke, his head lolled and he never looked his boss in the eyes.
“She's the best.” he said. “She showed me this, and it changed my life.” George rifled through his pockets and pulled out a disk made of concentric spinning wheels. “Have you seen this before?”
“Yes,” said Reggie as he grabbed for it.
George pulled it away, making a scolding motion with his index finger and saying, “This one's mine. Get your own. With that vote coming up, these things are more and more popular.” He leveled his face and finally met Binder's eyes. “They say you can beat the Sorter.”
“The Sorter isn't a game.”
“And yet the house always wins.”
“That thing is just divination. It's like dice or tarot cards. The results are nothing but chance.”
“Fortuna.” said George. “What better way to make the mind mysterious again?”
George shook the device, setting the wheels in motion and the lights blinking. When they stopped the red letter spelled the word “Irresistible.” He turned back to the girl and showed her the results.
“Isn't that the truth?” he said, pointing to himself.
“Get out.” said Reggie to the woman. When she didn't move, he showed her the pistol he'd secreted in his blazer pocket. “Go on.”
She ran away, leaving by the open doors.
Binder said, “Sorry to scare your girlfriend.”
“It's okay. I like her, but I love Cass.”
“We'll get to that in a moment.”
Reggie held the phone up for George to see the message.
COMMENCE PROGRAM ASSET TWO
“That's new. It's not my work.” said George. “Did you ask Cass?”
“Why would I ask her?”
“Maybe something leaked to her.”
“What have you done to Cass?” said Binder, waving the pistol.
George held his hands up
, saying, “I admit that I've been noodling with her. But you know, you should really be paying more attention to Dr. Nagel. Come feel this.”
He walked back into the space where Reggie had found him and the girl and motioned for the other man to follow. George place his palm against one of the racks and so did Reggie. It was warm. That was never supposed to happen, not with all those baffles and fans and ducts. It couldn't happen unless the room itself was failing to vent the heat. Binder began to speak, but George beat him to it.
“I know I've been a bad boy, but I didn't do this. Dr. Nagel's was here all night. You can check the logs. This is why the fire alarm is on.”
Reggie said, “Is there any damage to the Sorter?”
“No, but I was almost a few minutes too late.”
George walked to the back of the room. The rear wall bore what looked like a row of six foot tall propane tanks.
He said, “These tanks hold the CO2 fire suppressant. This whole thing is controlled by a VESDA box that feeds into the situational control computer. That's the same thing that runs our security system, our office LAN and all the other IT equipment that isn't a part of the Sorter. This morning I came in and heard the alarm.” He pointed into the air and smiled. “It's off now.”
“At what point did you bring that woman in here?”
“Oh, she came with with me. Anyway, the CO2 puts out a fire by suffocating the room. It's bad for people, but good for electronics. Much better than that.”
He pointed up