Blind Lake

Tess stood silently watching. If her father were here, he would have called her inside by now. Tess knew that she sometimes stared at things too long. At clouds or hills or, when she was in school, out the spotless window to the soccer field where white goalposts clocked the hours with their shadows. Until someone called her back to the world. Wake up, Tessa! Pay attention! As if she had been asleep. As if she had not been paying attention.

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

The yellow-windowed bus stopped at the distant guardhouse. A second bus pulled up behind it. Tess waited for the guard to wave the buses through. Almost a thousand people worked days at Blind Lake — clerks and support staff and the people who ran the stores — and the guard always waved the buses through.

Tonight, however, the buses stopped and stayed stopped.

Tess, the wind said. Which made Tess think about Mirror Girl and all the trouble that had caused her back at Crossbank…

“Tess!”

She jumped involuntarily. The voice had been real. Her mother’s.

“Sorry if I scared you—”

“It’s okay.” Tess turned and was pleased and reassured by the sight of her mother coming across the broad, neat lawn. Tessa’s mother was a tall woman, her long brown hair somewhat askew around her face, her ankle-length skirt flirting with the wind. The setting sun turned everything faintly red: the sky, the town houses, her mother’s face.

“You have your stuff?”

“At the front door.”

Tess saw her mother glance away toward the distant road. Another bus had come up behind the first two, and now all three were motionless at the gate.

Tess said, “Is something wrong with the fence?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure it’s nothing.” But she frowned and stood a moment, watching. Then she took Tessa’s hand. “Let’s go home, shall we?”

Tess nodded, suddenly eager for the warmth of her mother’s house, for the smell of fresh laundry and takeout food, for the reassurance of small enclosed spaces.

Three

The campus of the Blind Lake National Laboratory, its scientific and administrative offices and supply and retail outlets, had been constructed on the almost imperceptibly gentle slope of an ancient glacial moraine From the air it resembled any newly built suburban community, peculiar only in its isolation, served by a single two-lane road. At its center, adjacent to a partially enclosed retail strip called the mallway, was an O-shaped ring of ten-story concrete buildings, Hubble Plaza. This was where the interpretive work of the Blind Lake facility was done. The Plaza, with its narrow escutcheon windows and its grassy enclosed park, was the brain of the installation. The beating heart was a mile east of the inhabited town, in an underground structure from which two massive cooling towers rose into the brittle autumn air.

This building was officially the Blind Lake Computational Array, but it was commonly called Eyeball Alley, or the Alley, or simply the Eye.

Charlie Grogan had been chief engineer at the Alley since it had been powered up five years ago. Tonight he was working late, if you could call it “working late” when it was his regular custom to stick around well after the day shift had gone home. There was, of course, a night shift, and a supervising engineer to go with it (A

Tonight he finished filling out a requisition form and told his server to transmit it in the morning. He checked his watch. Ten to nine. The guys in the stacks were due for a break. Just a walk-through, Charlie promised himself. Then home to feed Boomer, his elderly hound, and maybe catch some downloads before bed. The eternal cycle.

He left his office and rode an elevator two levels deeper into the underground. The Alley was quiet at night. He passed no one in the sea-green lower-level hallways. There was only the sound of his footsteps and the chime of the transponder in his ID tag as he crossed into restricted areas. Mirrored doors offered him unwelcome reminders of his age — he had turned forty-eight last January — the creeping curvature of his spine, the paunch that ballooned over his belt buckle. A fringe of gray hair stood out against his dark skin. His father had been a light-ski

He detoured through the O/BEC gallery — though, like “staying late,” it was probably wrong to call it a “detour.” This was one of the stations of his habitual nightly walk.

The gallery was constructed like a surgical theater without the student seating, a ring-shaped tiled hallway fitted with sealed glass windows on its i

Charlie was an engineer, not a physicist. He could maintain the machines that maintained the platens, but his understanding of the fundamental process at work was partial at best. A “Bose-Einstein Condensate” was a highly ordered state of matter, and the BECs created linked electron particles called “excitons,” and excitons functioned as quantum gates to form an absurdly fast and subtle computing device. Anything beyond that Reader’s Digest sketch he left to the intense and socially awkward young theorists and graduate students who cycled through Eyeball Alley as if it were a summer resort. Charlie’s job was more practical: he kept it all working, kept it cool, kept the I/O smooth, fixed little problems before they became big problems.

Tonight there were four maintenance guys in sterile suits down in the plumbing, probably Stitch and Chavez and the new hands cycling through from Berkeley Lab. More people than usual… he wondered if A

He walked the circumference of the gallery once, then followed another corridor past the solid-state physics labs to the data control room. Charlie knew as soon as he stepped inside that something was up.

Nobody was on break. The five night engineers were all at their posts, feverishly scrolling systems reports. Only Chip McCullough looked up as Charlie came through door, and all he got from Chip was a glum nod. All this, in the few hours since his shift had officially ended.

A

“Just on my way out.”

“Through the stacks?”

“Came for coffee, actually. But you guys are busy.”

“We had a big spike through the I/O’s an hour ago.”

“Power spike?”

“No, an activity spike. The switchboard lit up, if you know what I mean. Like somebody fed the Eye a dose of amphetamine.”