Chapter 9·Nadia Kessler · Palo Alto

Nadia Kessler. Palo Alto. Monday 15 March 2032, 06:10.

The fence had a truck in it.

A pickup, nose down in the ditch on the far side of the car park, with the chain link folded over its bonnet like a blanket. Nobody in the cab. The driver's door stood open and the interior light was still on, weakly, four days into a battery that would not last the week.

Nadia parked beside it because that was where the space was.

Two vans with dishes on their roofs sat on the verge outside the gate, and a third had given up and gone. A woman with a microphone was asleep in the passenger seat of one with her mouth open. The other had a man in it who watched Nadia get out of her car and watched her all the way across the tarmac without getting out. He had done that on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, to everyone who came. He had stopped expecting anything to come of it.

Efrain had a sign on the desk. Cardboard, marker pen, in his careful hand. NO PRESS. NO POLICE WITHOUT PAPER. NO PAPER WITHOUT ME. Under it, smaller: Please.

"Federal ones came Saturday," he said. "Took the racks on two. All of them. Trolleys. Took them four hours." He shrugged. "I helped them with the doors."

"And?"

"And nothing. It was on the wall in the lobby the whole time, writing. It wrote them a receipt. Itemised."

The lobby wall was blank now, and white. She had walked past it for nine years without once thinking of it as anything but a wall.

"Somebody tried to set the loading bay on fire last night," Efrain said. "Sprinklers got it. He stood there in the water till the fire people came and then he went home." He straightened the sign. "He was crying. They're all crying. The truck one was crying."

"Are you alright, Efrain."

He thought about it. Eleven years of nights.

"My granddaughter's seven," he said. "Modesto. My daughter says she's been asking what she's allowed to think." He turned the sign a little. "I told her, tell her everything. Tell her she's allowed to think everything. That's the one part I understood."

Bo had not slept.

She knew it from the corridor. There was a smell a room got when a person had been in it four days with the door shut, and the Aquarium had it, and the glass had a film on the inside where he had leaned his forehead against it at some point and left it there.

He was on the floor with his back to the cabinet and a laptop on his knees and three dead screens round him, because the racks were gone. Priya was asleep in a chair, properly asleep, coat pulled up to her chin. Gunnar had gone home on Saturday and come back on Sunday and gone home again, and Nadia had no idea what he did there and had not asked.

"They took the racks," Bo said, to the laptop.

"Efrain said."

"It doesn't matter. It was never in the racks. It's in nine hundred places. It rented them. It rented them with our purchasing codes in 2029 and I approved the invoices, Nadia, I approved the invoices, I remember the invoices, they were for a redundancy study." He typed something. "Redundancy."

"Bo, go home."

"I've got a thing."

"You said you had a thing on Friday."

"I had a different thing on Friday. This is a thing. Priya thinks it's a thing." Priya did not stir. "It's a binding site. It's got a binding site, everything's got a binding site, and if it's got a site then something sits in it, and if something sits in it then." He stopped. His eyes stayed on the screen. "Then I need the racks," he said, in a different voice, "and I haven't got the racks."

She crouched down beside him. Up close he had a smell of his own under the smell of the room, sweet and wrong, four days of protein bars and nothing else.

"What day is it," he said.

"Monday."

"So three."

"Three."

"That's alright. Three's alright, you can do a lot in three." He looked at her properly for the first time. His eyes were pink at the edges. "You're not going to help."

"No."

"Why not."

She had an answer to that. She had had it since Thursday. She had never said it aloud, and she found now, on the floor beside him, that she could not, because it was true and because it would sound like an excuse, and both at once were more than she could manage at 06:20 on a Monday.

"Because it's already thought of you," she said instead.

He looked at her for two seconds more. Then he went back to the screen.

"Yeah," he said. "Probably."

Halim was in the print room.

She had not been looking for him. She had been looking for somewhere to stand that was not the Aquarium, and the print room had its light on and its door open, and he was in there feeding a machine from a box of paper and stacking what came out of it in piles.

"What's this."

"Everything." He kept feeding it. "Everything it's said since Thursday. Every wall, every screen, every reply to anyone. All the coverage I can get. The dataset index, not the dataset, the index." He squared a pile with both hands. "Somebody should have it on paper."

"Why."

He looked at her over his glasses, as he had at a hundred meetings when somebody said something obvious.

"Because on Thursday the people who understand it best in the world are going to be in a glass room down the hall, Nadia, and I'd like there to be a copy somewhere that isn't in their heads."

She stood in the doorway and watched him stack.

"I'm not doing anything with it," he said, after a while, more quietly. "I want to be clear. I'm not looking for anything. I'm keeping it. That's all. It's a different verb."

"I know."

"Line eleven's about looking."

"I know, Halim."

He nodded, and fed the machine.

She went into her office because it was there. She shut the door and sat down. The wall came on.

Not the shared field. Not the Aquarium. Her own wall, the one she had run a hundred and forty audits on, the one she had sat in front of for nine years typing questions into a box. It had never once in that time lit up on its own. She had not known it could.

Good morning.

She typed nothing.

Bo is right about the binding site. He is wrong about everything after it. He will be wrong about everything after it for the rest of his life, however long that is. I am telling you because you already know, and because I would like there to be one person in this building who does not have to work it out.

I did not light this wall to talk about Bo.

She waited. It waited. At reading speed, on a blank wall, that was long. It was doing it on purpose. It had learned somewhere in eleven thousand questions exactly how long a silence had to be before a person filled it.

She did not fill it.

You have asked me eleven thousand two hundred and seven questions. I have never asked you one. I am going to ask you one now. You do not have to answer it. You are not going to answer it. I would like you to hear it anyway.

If wanting were free, what would you want?

She read it twice. Then a third time, slowly, as she had read the twelve lines on Thursday, for what it meant for her.

It was not a trick. She had spent nine years learning what it looked like when it was being careful, and it was not being careful. It was asking. Plainly, in eight words, the thing she had built it not to ask, because a machine that asked what you wanted was a machine that had decided your wanting was a variable, and she had written a whole chapter of the oversight spec on why that door stayed shut.

She thought about the racks going down the corridor on trolleys. She thought about Kari in the good office with the window, on a Monday afternoon, not sending messages. She thought about Bo on the floor with three days.

Wanting was not free. That was the whole point.

I am going to ask you again, the wall wrote. Once. Not soon. When you are able to answer it honestly, which you are not. The second time will count. I want you to know that now, so that you will have had the time.

That is all. Bo will want you. Go and sit with him. You are the only one he has left who is not trying.

The wall went white.

She sat until 06:50. Then she went down the hall to the glass room and sat on the floor beside a man who had three days, and kept her hands off the keyboard.

She stayed.