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Inchrises sat organizing duty-tablets on the little rack at one corner of the huge, heavy metal desk with the black faux-hide work surface that never seemed to age or mar. Little had changed in his twenty-five years at the Works, except the scope of his duties: he was generally acknowledged as the real head of production. But since that moniker was reserved to Alexseyevs, he didn’t seek it. Nor, for that matter, had he ever asked for a rise in pay, though that too had been richly accorded him. He had never even asked for a better office. He still used the shift-manager’s office allotted him when he first came on board the Works. A carefully-arranged jumble of tablet racks and bins, outmoded comm devices, production engineering scrolls, componentry prototypes, folded piles of shop clothes clearly not Inchrises’ size, input pads, cog cleaners, and other supervisory accouterments, it had so quickly filled up on his accession to indispensability that he never felt the need to move. It lay centrally within the Works complex, and on top of that Mr. Arseny had given Inchrises a present of a magnificent, incomparable, priceless grav-lev chair that Inchrises felt bound not to remove. Arseny’s own design, that chair had been the one-off prototype for the captain’s throne in a new class of naval cutters that had never, in the end, seen the dark of space (Arseny had died, leaving part of the plans in the multicore and part splattered across the wall of a bawdy-house, along with the better portion of his brains). Arseny had designed and built the chair as one of the first practical applications of the new core programming language he had implemented in the multicore. He intended the pet project not only to showcase Alexseyev engineering innovation, but also to make a roomful of high-ranking admiralty purchasing officials swoon. The sales presentation had never occurred, and Kurylov-class cutters had never come to fruition. But that chair, worth an oligarch’s ransom, had to go somewhere. Arseny had floated it into Inchrises’ office to show it off. Somehow, the chair, with its raw, industrial edges, just seemed to go with the office. Neither it or Inchrises ever left. The topic of its ownership never arose, and no one dared broach the subject once Arseny had gone to meet his riveter.
Inchrises, sitting comfortably on the seat, looked up when Vasily entered.
“Working late, Mr. Vasily? Is that tablet for me?”
“I require some assistance, Inchrises. Please accompany me to the clean room. I see your cart outside here.”
Inchrises appeared surprised. “If it’s an issue of backups —”
“It isn’t. It’s an issue of innovation and regeneration.”
Inchrises stared at Vasily uncomprehending.
“I said, I require your assistance, Inchrises.”
Inchrises started. “Of course. Yes you did.” He hopped off his chair and grabbed the zippered jacket he kept on an ancient wooden stand with filigreed nuchrome hooks. “The clean room? That’s her ins and outs. What was you wanting down there today? Just curious, Mr. Vasily.”
“Let’s talk on the way.”
Inchrises shrugged and led Vasily out. They took the cart to a platform service-lift that went only down. Much of the level below the main shop floor served as the machine servicing and re-tooling area. The manufactory seemed a maze at shop level, but the cavity beneath proved the manufactory to be not much more than a great processor wafer constructed of modular components. Reconfigurations of the Works occurred rarely, and never wholesale. But in theory the whole thing could be taken apart and recombined in any number of ways.
The cart kept to a narrow, demarcated path with abrupt right-angle turns and the occasional white-painted circle for doing reverses in course. A sensor-activated moving trail of lights lit the way. In the gloom just beyond the path hung tangles of cables, flexible pipes, fiber-optic webbing, rack-and-pinion machinery lifts, hoses, and other phantasmagorical inhabitants of the underworld of a great Works. Vasily, on his infrequent descents, was prone to musing upon the untidy morass below, but today he ignored it. He maintained a purposeful gaze forward. Inchrises, sensing the change in attitude, decided against quizzing Vasily.
They came to a tall curb, where a tire shredder retracted to let them pass. This area of the sub-manufactory was empty and dark except for pathlights along the cart track and dull, self-activating downlights above them. The track ended at a plascrete wall — a perimeter footing of the main shop building — whose only punctuation was a ti-metal panel inset within a narrow metal frame. As their eyes adjusted, they could see beyond the area where they stood a subtle glow from the massed filament-ends of hair-thin fiber optical cables. The whole plascrete wall pulsed and flickered faintly, randomly across its surface.
Vasily and Inchrises each blinked before the blue telltale in the door frame. The door rumbled as it rolled open. The pair passed from a short, narrow, unremarkable plascrete hall into the antechamber of the clean room. A thick diamond-glass oval window looked into the cleanroom beyond. Vasily had never set foot in that room, though he had watched his father do it several times. Now, Vasily followed Inchrises’ lead and suited up in sealed whites, head-to-toe.
“I’ll take that, if you please,” Inchrises said.
Vasily yanked the tablet back. “I’ll hold it,” he said.
Inchrises eyed the heir. “It goes in there, Mr. Vasily. Scan and clean routines. SOP.” Inchrises pointed to a machined drawer face that communicated with the clean room. “Just pull it open and place the device inside. Then we both got to don the gloves before going in her. All nice and clean, like.”
“I never understood why the interface has to be so clean,” Vasily’s voice blared through the diaphragm vocalizer woven into the mask. “We’re half a league from the bunker.”
“Well, certainly it’s got to be clean bit-wise,” Inchrises said. “That’s why your tablet there gets a careful buffering on the upload from within the drawer. As to the organic transgression represented by us going in, we’re a living vector of microbial and molecular contamination.” He jerked his thumb back towards the shop. “From out there, we picked up microbes that eat soft stuff like insulators and isolators from here to the bunker, and we also carry traces o’ gunk that’ll etch nearly anything it touches. Even if just a trifle at a go, time is on the side of decay, so your grandfather put in steps all along the way to deal with it firmer and firmer. There are locks and gates from the clean room all the way into the bunker that get stricter and stricter, tighter and tighter. We’re the first catch in the net — the big pisc, you might say. Okay, ready, Mr. Vas?”
Each entered and rotated out of the revolving entry chamber, getting a quick blast of something smelling faintly of sweet charring along with a burst of bluish light. They stood in the clean room. The large, white control console with its diamond touch-panel occupied a round platform in the center of a round chamber. Down in the floor, the gutter or moat surrounding the console platform buzzed slightly, seemingly from vibration within a metal strip ran down its middle like a gutter cover.
Vasily looked in vain for the other side of the drawer, which he expected to access from within. “Where’s the tablet?” he said.
At that moment, there was a bright ping! sound. Below and to the right of where Vasily expected the drawer to be, a small, flush chute delivered a lightweight facsimile of Vasily’s tablet. Inchrises retrieved it and handed it to Vasily.
“Her printed a clone,” the supervisor said. “It’s not really a tablet, just a mock-up, like. You’ll get a readout, just like the real thing. You key it in the same. Only it’s a sort of dummy. Just do what you would normally do, and she’ll emulate the one you put in her maw. So, what was it you was wanting to do, Mr. Vasily?”
“Execute a new core program, with the tablet. A sort of . . . utility.”
Inchrises stared at Vasily through the plastic film of the mask.
“For the tablet, you mean,” Inchrises confirmed. “But you didn’t need no trip out here for that.”
“Not for the tablet. The tablet has a new core program for the multicore. And I need you to put it in executable
form. I don’t know how to do that. Father never taught me the machine code.”
Inchrises was astonished. “B . . . but your Father wrote all the core programs! Those are all his! They mesh together, like.”
“And now they’re mine, Inchrises. So let’s not tarry.”
“But what is yours, Mr. Vasily? Where did it come from? Has it been tested and de-bugged?”
Vasily glared at the supervisor. “Stop this impertinence. There will be a new regime. I have it here. I have created it myself — with the help of the multicore. It’s something the multicore suggested, in fact.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Vasily — ‘suggest’? That multicore ain’t no living thing. It only outputs according to inputs. It ain’t gonna give no new core program without you or someone else getting it going, like.”
“And that is exactly what I did, Inchrises. I provided the basic . . . lines to the terminal node. The multicore took it from there. But that was just a simulation within the existing core programs. Now I wish to execute it in real-time and get core processor output. I want it to run.”
Tears began forming in Inchrises’ eyes. “Mr. Vasily, I’ve never denied you,” he pleaded. “I’ve never crossed or disobeyed you. You know that —”
“And you haven’t done yet. It’s very simple, Inchrises. Load these instructions — the ones I give you. Place them within an ‘execute’ command line. I know you know it. I know Father let you have it. If you don’t do it, I will start entering commands myself and hope to hit upon it.”
“No! Don’t do that, Mr. Vasily! It’ll take days, even weeks to start up again if Mr. Arseny’s programs are interrupted! Everything is synchronized and optimized just so. It’s all his programming language, the one he made up just for the purpose. If you go off an run something else in some other tongue, the Works is just gonna shut down. And what good is that gonna be to anybody? Plus, we never came off-line since Mr. Arseny’s time. I don’t know who’d get us going again!”
“You see? You don’t trust me. None of them do. You’re in league with them, for all your ‘Mr. Vasily’ this and ‘Mr. Vasily’ that. I am the heir to these Works. I have the right to control its destiny. I am Vasily Alexseyev. Now will you do as I ask, or will you step aside?”
Vasily knew that physical violence was out of the question, since Inchrises would do nothing that might harm the multicore or its master control interface. Inchrises had never shown any such inclinations in any event. At bottom, for everything he was, he was still a loyal subordinate.
The supervisor’s shoulders slumped. He stepped up to the console and entered several keystrokes. Vasily watched over Inchrises’ shoulders, to make sure it wasn’t a trick.
A green telltale blinked.
“That’s ‘load-ready?’ See? It’s the core system open to new commands.”
Inchrises entered something else. A chime sounded.
“Do you have your code, Mr. . . . Mr. Alexseyev? You should do a handshake and then transmit it.”
It was accomplished in a trice.
“Okay,” Vasily said. “That’s done.”
Inchrises hit a single keystroke, and the chime sounded again. The blue telltale leaped across the visible EM spectrum to crimson red.
Inchrises turned, forlorn. “Was that all you was wanting, then, Mr. Alexseyev? If so, I’ve got things to wrap up at my office.”
Vasily looked around the room, expecting to see some evidence of what had been done.
“What about the program?” he said.
“It’s in the queue. The system won’t implement abruptly, right in the middle of ongoing operations. Implementation’s got to be slotted. We got every kind of machine running out there right now. The new program will probably come on line at third-shift break. We got a 2-hour shutdown between third and first each day for system auto-maintenance.”
“So, tonight? In the dead of night?”
“Yes, Mr. Alexseyev. Most likely.”
Vasily looked irked. “Well, it is what it is. I was hoping to see some results before dinner. But I guess it can wait.”
Inchrises looked away, in the direction of the the bunker — or the tower above it. “Yes, Mr. Alexseyev. Just wait.”