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22.
The Bit Cave, for all that it consisted of an island of light and cubicles amid a vast, amorphous darkness, had its own sort of districts and regions. Tedda would approach each day from the rear entrance of what had once been a huge auditorium, whose seats were now all gone.
On her left was the very hushed and conservative realm of the mathematicians or quants, who were very cliquish and had their own social order. Mostly they seemed to be pudgy middle-aged men with fleshy lips and cynical eyes. Their conspiracies seemed Byzantine, their betrayals of each other subtle, their schemes and jockeying endless.
On her right as she approached were the young software engineers, with hardware, systems, and com handshakes mixed in. This seemed to be the fun section, where giggling could be heard at sudden moments, or even someone crying and overturning his books and papers in a fit of frustration. At times like that, the mathematicians across the aisle would prairie-dog, raising their heads to eye-level in order not to miss a good row.
On the far left, beyond the mathematicians, and divided from them by a main cross-aisle, were the project leaders and administrators, like Wally.
On the far right, beyond the engineers, was everyone else, including accountants, Tedda, clerks, lab assistants, technicians of varying specialties, and even the customary fatherland detective spy, one Werner von Werner, who hardly ever spoke with anyone, but seemed aware of every conversation, every wink of the eye, every subversive gesture. Lindy whispered to Tedda: "They have microphones and sound pickups and minicams all over the place. An ordinary screw in the edge of your cubby divider might be an electronic spying device."
In the middle of these four tribes was a neutral area with tables and chairs, where people went to relax or have lunch. Lamps hung down low over the tables, and several people plaid cards at every opportunity, it seemed. There was another island outside the four tribes, just off to the right equidistant from the programmers and the clerks. There were two tables there—a long one, and perpendicular to it, like the middle bar in a letter 'E,' was a shorter table. Several lamps hung over these tables also, and here people had set up board games that they could play for days on end. They could leave their chips and paper money and dice and markers in place, and return in between shifts to play another half hour at a time. There were stacks of old-fashioned cardboard boxes under the table, with various such games.
Tedda found herself getting hooked sipping hot tea and watching anywhere from four to six people play a board game called Monorail. "Aren't you ashamed of yourselves for sitting here with this old thing?" she teased them. A chorus of laughs and snickers and disavowals came back at her. "We get tired of the virtual stuff," someone said. "Once in a while you have to go back to basics. It doesn't get any more basic than this."
It seemed at the moment an exciting play was in progress. The board itself was simple. Resembling a certain famous real estate deal board game, this one involved traveling through an exotic, faraway city on an advanced rail system. The object of the game, from what Tedda could see, was to own as much of the capital assets as possible. You started from a rail yard with a stack of paper money and a game token. The game tokens were all the same—a really cool electric locomotive about the size of a noodle. Each player had a different color locomotive, and each player owned a trolley line named after the color of his token. Thus, one player owned the Green Line, another the Red Line, another the Yellow Line, and so forth. Say you owned the Green Line—the object was to add to the Green Line's properties. Once you owned at least one property on each of the four sides of the board, you could charge Monorail Fare if anyone landed on any square you owned. As you accumulated cash, you could add frills for which people had to pay. Everyone started with Third Class service. You could build your way up to First Class service (very expensive!). Also, travelers had to rest in hotels, and that got expensive. So it went, and Tedda found herself getting sucked into the game during her spare time. She enjoyed the young programmers and engineers, male and female, bantering, flirting, dissing each other, having popcorn fights. Even the detective came snooping around now and then. Often the area smelled of fresh popcorn, a little burned around the edges, or coffee, also burned.
Tedda had her own little cubicle off to one side in the cats and dogs department, as it was known. She met angry stenographers with advanced degrees, who were bitter at not having done better. She was surrounded by crippled army veterans, a man horribly disfigured in a fighter plane fire, a track star doing religious studies because he believed in prophecies, a pair of women raising children together as single mothers while constantly complaining of a dearth of good men, and so forth. Wally stopped by from time to time to see how she was doing, and she was doing just fine.
In fact, she almost couldn't keep up with herself. She had to be teased from her cubicle for tea and popcorn, and a game of chess or checkers, or Monorail. She'd sit in her cubicle with pencils and paper, with her computer and printer, and write programs that calculated the dimensions of tiny spaces, the thresholds of energy levels at which changes of state took place, the quantum strata, and more. She thought she was beginning to come to a more or less intuitive sense of how the black monopoles worked. Actually, she began to be driven by worry. She told Wally about this one day as they sat having hot tea alone together out of earshot.
"What's troubling you that you called me out here?" he asked.
She pushed a stray wisp of hair from her eyes as she showed him a tattered printout spread all over her lap. She indicated features with a mechanical pencil amid the tight jumble of tiny black ink speckles. "Wally, the problem I see is that there may be a critical energy shed coming as we continue to grow this maze."
He blurted absently: "What, you think it might blow?"
She rested her hands on the paper on her knees so the pencil hung loosely. "I don't know if I'd put it quite that way, but yes, at this point anything is a possibility."
"And why do you figure this?"
The pencil started moving again as she pointed to patterns and tendencies. "Wally, if you track the growth of this maze, it's out of control. In fact, it's governed only by the fact that there are brown-downs almost every day, especially around air attacks, when the city reduces the energy grid to minimal output. Nevertheless, there is still volume growth in progress."
"So our maze is getting bigger?"
"Yes, and therefore the overall energy demand is increasing."
"What if we slowly lower it?"
"You can't shrink this thing. I mean, you can't lop sections off. There's nowhere to go. Once we've created this thing, which we have, the only way to definitely defeat the natural growth momentum would be to totally shut the power down."
"And then?"
"The entire universe of that maze would vanish as if it never existed."
"And the other side?"
She hesitated. "Wally, there's more."
He stared at her intently.
"I'm afraid their activity is feeding it too. Without meaning to, both sides have been contributing to the steady proliferation of physical features by means of these Rules and the subatomic energies that drive them."
He threw his empty cup down so it bounced on the floor. "You need to understand that people's jobs and careers are on the line here. You don't have a family, do you? Well, I do. They won't want to see me commanding an artillery battery out in the field if this project gets shut down." He rose. "Don't tell anyone about this, okay? Let me know if you figure out anything more, and we'll take it from there." He added in a weak and insincere voice: "No need to start any panic." Then he added: "Mind you watch yourself too. You have more riding on this than you know."
With that he stormed off.
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