Each workstation has an electric motor and four nylon wheels. They form into groups and they break apart and re-form into different groups. You never know where any of the individual Big Brains might be just by looking, but we have an app that shows current locations. I know, for example, that Tattooed Tommy, the crazy-smart biochemist from Berkeley, is at grid J-7.
In the kitchen, I grab the coffee cart. Caffeine in various forms, organic herbal tea, bagels, muffins, energy bars. This isn’t my job, but I don’t mind covering for the regular dude. There’s no better way to find out what’s going on than by being a peon everyone ignores. If you’re the coffee guy, it’s just assumed that you don’t understand anything you see on the computer screens, holographic displays, and even the occasional old-school chalkboard.
In a place filled with people who think of themselves as Big Brains, a guy dishing out fruit cups is invisible. No one notices when I seem to be checking e-mail on my phone, but I’m actually taking a picture or hitting the “record” voice memo button. I’ve got a pretty good memory, and that helps, too.
I pause and take a swig from my water bottle. Karen, one of the biochem research assistants, grabs a cheese Danish off my cart. “You get a promotion?” she asks.
I shrug, move on, keep my eyes open. It’s hard to steal data here, very hard. But not impossible.
My biggest problem: At Spiker Biopharm, we don’t do cloud.
It’s a security thing. Everyone uploads data to the cloud. That’s where people have their pictures, their tunes, their manuscripts, whatever. But Spiker isn’t “whatever,” so all Spiker data goes strictly to in-house servers.
No CD burners. No USB ports for thumb drives.
Which makes it very complicated for me to steal data. And yet …
There’s a file in the cloud. I’ve encrypted it so heavily the CIA couldn’t break in. People usually use a four- or five-character security code. My code is thirty-two characters long.
I comfort myself with this knowledge as I make my way toward Tommy.
“Bagel and a capp, right?” I ask.
He’s around thirty. Covered in tattoos, everywhere except his hands, neck, and his face. Even his forehead has the word “Pixies”—that’s an alt-rock band—in gothic script.
Tommy thinks of himself as a cool guy. He’s nice to me, in the condescending way that a person who’s always been the smartest guy in the room is nice to someone he sees as inferior.
“Poppy seed?” he asks.
“Poppy seed,” I confirm.
He takes the food, sighs, and shakes his head. “Hey, kid. Have you met the girl?”
I guess what girl he means, but I need to play dumb. “What girl?”
“The kid. The daughter. I don’t know her name.”
“You mean Evening Spiker? Yeah, I met her.”
He looks at me doubtfully. He’s judging whether I can answer his next question. He’s wondering whether even communicating with me is a waste of time.
“What’s the deal with her? She bright? Stupid? What?”
I shrug. Because I’m just a peasant and that’s what dumb teenagers do. “She seems pretty smart, I guess. Why?”
He shakes his head, irritated. The questions are only supposed to go in one direction. But he’s Tattooed Tommy, so he has to maintain his reputation for not being an a-hole. “Boss is tasking her. On something of mine. Amateur hour.” His eyes flicker, he’s said too much, he’s come too close to criticizing Terror Spiker.
I shrug again. “She can’t be doing much. She’s pretty messed up.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Tommy says confidently, “but I’m guessing she’ll recover amazingly well.”
“I hope so,” I say. And I think, yeah, she will recover amazingly. And thanks for confirming you know that, poppy-seed man.
“Anyway, it’s nothing,” Tommy adds. “The software she’s playing with. Just some widget I threw together one night when I was seriously stoned.”
“Terror was showing it to her this morning,” I say. “Project 88 something?”
“Yeah.” Tommy sips his cappuccino. “Yeah, like I say, it’s crap. A brain fart.”
“Another bagel?” I ask.
“Nah.”
“Later, then.” I wheel away.
A brain fart.
Whatever you say, Tommy.
I know a thing or two about Project 88715, and it’s a whole lot more than some educational widget you threw together after a couple bong hits.
It’s more than a glittering strand of DNA on a giant monitor.
More than a toy that Terra’s using to keep Eve occupied.
This much I know already: When Tommy and the Big Brains, in whispered, wry asides, talk about Project 88715, they call it something else.
They call it the “Adam Project.”
– 14 –
“So when do we get to make his unit?” Aislin asks, staring up at the giant monitor.
“His what?”
“Exactly. His ‘what.’ His ‘Whoa, what is that?’ His area.”
“Are you referring to his boy parts?” I am trying to sound indifferent. Indifferent doesn’t really work well with the phrase “boy parts.” But in my embarrassment I can’t come up with a better phrase.
“Did you just actually say ‘boy parts’?” Aislin asks, rolling a chair over.
“You have to do things in order. That’s how the software works,” I explain. “First it has you decide about the simple physical things. This morning I worked on the eyes.”
“You mean his eyes.” Aislin watches me tap away at my keyboard. “You are making a male, right?”
I nod.
“Atta girl.”
Tap, tap, click. I really love this software. It’s like making art, without the gut-wrenching fear of failure. Creation, with a handy-dandy “delete” key.
I tap something called a “Show Me” button. The screen on the wall shows two enormous irises. Just irises. No whites, nothing else.
“Yuck!” Aislin exclaims. “What the hell are those?”
“Irises. I gave him hazel eyes.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never really known anyone with eyes that color. Maybe that’s why.”
It’s fascinating, the way they’ve designed this software. There are a bunch of genes that deal with the simple matter of eye color. You drop them into a sort of grid. The grid—which in this version has been designed to look like a very long string of beads—has a lot of the “beads” already filled in. That leaves plenty of blank spots for me to pick and choose.
I can increase or decrease the magnification. At life-size they’re invisibly small. Blown up, they’re six feet in diameter. Zoom in all the way and you get into the nano scale, where they don’t have color at all. They’re just bumpy gray cells.
Aislin puts her boots up on the desk and leans back, hands laced behind her head. “This is creeping me out. Do something un-gross.”
I add very white whites to the eyes. “Okay, now the capillaries,” I say, scanning my choice menu.
“Let’s do abs instead.”