I BEGAN TO HELP THE Maxes and Tristan complete construction of the ODEC under Oda-sensei’s guidance. The memory, now, of such tomboyishness, freedom of movement, the liberty of a day innocently alone with unmarried young men, and above all, the virtue of labor—these things make me almost pant with longing today, as I sit here breathing the fumes from this stinking whale oil lamp in my whale-bone corset (very difficult to believe Victoria Regina is about to rule over half the planet dressed like this. Just saying.).
As I had guessed, the “tanks” Tristan had referred to were industrial vessels made to contain thousands of gallons within their fiberglass walls. There were two of them, an inner nested within an outer, with a few inches’ separation between them. We had to cover both of them with insulation to keep the liquid helium from boiling away. This was a combination of four-by-eight-foot slabs of pink foam from Home Depot, and some kind of weird brew that you would mix up in a bucket by stirring two different chemicals together. Then it would expand enormously as it foamed up and stick to everything like Krazy Glue before it hardened.
After it had been clad in its insulating jacket, the outer tank just fit through the hole cut through the floor of the former conference room, and rested on the cellar floor below, its upper part projecting up into the ground floor. Here the Maxes cut a rectangular hatch through it, and a matching one through the inner tank several inches away. They fiberglassed the two rectangles together to form a hollow door capable of being filled with liquid helium, and likewise sealed the jambs. Meanwhile, expensive-looking stuff kept showing up at the loading dock. I didn’t need a West Point physics degree to understand that this was cryogenics equipment.
Though the new ODEC (the Mark II) was much bigger than Professor Oda’s cat-sized Mark I, it was recognizably the same machine. Instead of an inner plywood box with a cat bed and a cream saucer, this one had that inner tank, which was just large enough for one person to sit in a chair, or two to stand upright. Much of its volume was spoken for by what Tristan referred to, somewhat unnervingly, as “life support stuff.” I made a mental note to ask him about that later. Its walls, for the time being, were just bare fiberglass, as it had come from the factory. If the Mark I was any guide, however, those walls would soon be lined with circuit boards. I had overheard enough snatches of conversation between Oda and Tristan to know that these were being produced offsite and that some were already inbound, plastered with tracking numbers that Rebecca was checking several times a day. When they showed up, and when the Maxes installed them, they would be connected to the inevitable web of cables, which would be routed under the floor and then up into the server room. This was being bolted together and brought online by a trio of bearded men who all politely introduced themselves as Vladimir.
Once the Vladimirs had bolted the vertical racks into the floor, they devoted whole days to opening cardboard boxes, which had been piling up in ziggurats on the loading docks, and extricating black slabs, approximately the size and shape of pizza boxes, and slamming them into rails on those racks. Each of them, I was assured, contained sixteen computers, each of which was a bazillion times more powerful than the single, forlorn Indigo that had served as the brains of the Mark I. The Vladimirs were nothing if not friendly. I got the sense that this would be my last opportunity to have anything like a normal conversation with them. Once all of these pizza box servers were up and running, they would revert to their natural behavior patterns. For now, working on their knees with screwdrivers, performing tasks well below their pay grade, they were just happy to have someone to talk to. And talk they did, with a kind of messianic zeal, about the awesomeness of the cluster they were assembling. One of them, whom I’d mentally renamed Longbeard, actually did have an Eastern European accent. I got the impression from stray remarks dropped here and there that he’d had a hand in the creation of the uber-paranoid Shiny Hat operating system that had been the bane of my existence these six months. Perhaps he was the ur-Vlad.
I was drawn into the mindless but satisfying activity of flattening boxes and stuffing plastic packing material into garbage bags. On a trip to the Dumpsters, I noted that it was dark. Perhaps we would knock off soon. But the Vladimirs had just ordered another round of quadruple-shot espresso drinks from the Apostolic Café, and Tristan announced that he and the Maxes were going to pull an all-nighter and leak-check the entire chamber so that it could be test-filled in the morning. Frank Oda kindly gave me a lift home. I wondered what Rebecca made of all this, but suspected this was perhaps a delicate subject, so refrained from asking.
It was strange spending an evening in my own apartment. I’d anticipated a sense of relief, but the solitude was almost disorienting. I heated up some leftovers, settled down with my laptop, and checked my email for the first time in days. I had three notifications from Facebook.
I usually forgot about Facebook; I checked in about once a month. I logged in now, to see that my account had three “friend requests.” One was from my mother, one was a nearly pornographic image of an attractive young Chinese man whose name translated to “Jade Dagger,” and one was a woman named Erszebet Karpathy whose picture appeared to be a state-issued ID of an octogenarian drag queen. I accepted my mother’s request, disregarded the other two as spam, sent my mother a perfunctory “Welcome to the Twenty-First Century” post, and checked my wall.
There was a message posted on it from Erszebet Karpathy, dated three days earlier. “I am still waiting! Let me know when you are ready to begin.”
Odd.
I scrolled down. The next most recent post on my page was also from this Erszebet Karpathy, ten days earlier: “I am waiting for all to be placed in readiness.”
Next was a request from one of my former students to play some kind of dumb social media game.
Then another post from Erszebet Karpathy, this one from nearly a month earlier: “Melisande, is it time yet? You said April or May of this year.”
That was unnerving. Who was Erszebet Karpathy? I went to her “About” page, to find it blank. Occasionally I accepted private students, usually interested in Bible studies, who wished to parse something in Aramaic. But it had been at least a year since I’d fielded any requests. Tired from a long day, I closed the laptop and went to sleep without even finishing dinner.
The next morning, when I opened my laptop again to check the New York Times headlines, I was still logged in to Facebook, and there was a new message from the Karpathy chick: “Melisande. I see that you have been active on Facebook within the past 12 hours, so I KNOW you are receiving these messages. Contact me and I will tell you where to collect me.” She had changed her profile picture: now it was a “vintage”-looking, sepia-toned portrait of a matron in Edwardian costume, the kind of photo you dress for at Ye Olde County Faire.