The Lightcap (10 page)

“Good,” intoned the soft voice in his ear.  “Meet me at my desk.”  Despite the even tone of the dome AI reading the message, Adam detected frustration from Nate.

The subway brought him to the stop near Adaptech shortly after he received Nate’s message.  He ran a mesh query for Ensyn, wanting to be as prepared as possible once he reached the office.  As he exited through the train’s open doors, his query’s initial results came to his dome.

Three quarters of a century before, several companies raced to replace the keyboards, mice, and screens that had dominated computer interaction for the preceding decades.  New interfaces were developed, large and miniature touchscreens incorporating gesture input—two, three, and four fingers used to draw intricate and specific patterns—to perform desired tasks.  Eventually lasers replaced screens, lasers that fired directly into the retina, overlaying virtual data atop the data absorbed by the senses from real world.  Though they had been heralded as new and novel ways to interact with computers, the touchscreens led to worker fatigue, arms raised instead of planted firmly against desks while typing on keyboards, and heads-up displays quickly led to collisions for pedestrians and drivers alike.  No one could accept such a state of affairs for long.  A public-relations nightmare resulted.

Audio came to be accepted as the safest medium by which to transmit data to users on the go before the Mind Drive debuted, which smoothed its pathway to success.  A domer could transmit video signals wirelessly to a nearby notetab or vid screen.  Adam felt thankful for this as he made his way up to the ground level, his eyes closed, his hand trailing along the icy cold railing bolted into the wall of the stairwell.

The voice in his ear read the first result, an About Us page from the Ensyn Energy public node.  “Ensyn Energy was founded by Doctors Freeman and Graeme.  Originally specializing in biomass petroleum, the company diversified into other areas after an investment of capital from Luminus Industries, eventually bringing a high yield solar panel to market incorporating energy production via photosynthetic biomass.  We are now providing electricity to seventy percent of the Region and growing.  We at Ensyn Energy are happy to serve and to provide the technology powering our lives.”

Typical PR speak
, thought Adam.  Other results filled his dome with stories about how Ensyn had used past-due utility bills to obtain liens against debtor property, foreclose, then rent it out at twice the rate—sometimes to the original occupant.  Those unfortunate enough to make the transition from mortgage holder to tenant were typically forced to get another job or even indenture the mortgage to their children, payment for keeping houses in families funded by economic bondage passed from one generation to the next.  Adam felt a wave of disgust and revulsion at such predatory practices.

Adam didn’t have time to sort through most of the reports, but he saved the search to study it in greater detail later.  He went inside the Adaptech building and up to Nate’s floor, taking two stairs at a time with little effort, unusual for him.  The security department, consisting of Adam’s old colleagues, was a handful of floors from the ground.  A typical corporate cube farm, each homogeneous grey wall blending into the next.  Adam walked down three rows, then turned to the right and went to the end to seek Nate.

Adam had been many times to Nate’s desk, the largest one at the end, a perk of managerial excess.  Truth be told, there was an extra square meter, not much difference for a man of Nate’s girth but enough to cause envy in many others.  The extra desk space at both ends, most of which was taken up by stacks of paperwork and memos, provided enough room for an extra picture of his children.  Nate Taylor was a family man, and a family man was a good company man.

Adam was surprised to clear the cubicle wall and see an empty workspace where Nate usually sat.  No chair, no light, not even a vid screen.  Boxes covered the inoffensive geometry of the carpet, stacked under the curved plastic desk and out into the center, leaving just enough space for Adam to kneel down at the desk in front of them.  He opened the closest box and was surprised to see stacks of lined and printed.  Almost all records were digital due to ease and cost.  Paper was uncommon and indicated a particularly old or important document. 

Adam felt a spontaneous wave of respect and stopped looking at the papers, instead pushing aside his confusion long enough to send a message to Nate.  He thought,
Where are you?  I’m at your desk.  Did you move? 
After waiting several minutes for a reply, his curiosity overcame his patience and he started to thumb through the documents.  The first he pulled was a court judgment of a foreclosure filed by Ensyn Energy, but it included notes from the corporate attorneys, scratched words in the margins suggesting Ensyn had influenced the decision by acting through a Metra Corp proxy controlling that particular district court.  Each case Adam flipped through showed similar behavior, odds stacked against homeowners from the beginning.

He opened a box containing pictures and field reports from an Ensyn plant outside Boston, a reclamation facility for processing sewage sludge into biomass to be later refined into petroleum.  An accident had apparently resulted in contamination of drinking water sources, and Adam even found evidence suggesting a blackmail had occurred.  Several of the pictures showed a woman and a man with a ring whispering to one another in the quiet corner of an elegant restaurant.  Two more with the same pair entering an ornamented hotel.  Any investigation was over before it started, and it seemed clear to Adam this was a result of bribery, not justice being served.

In the last box Adam found financial documents.  These records showed Luminus Industries had become a Metra Corp shell company over twenty years before, a fact hidden from shareholders of both organizations.  After its significant investment, Luminus controlled Ensyn Energy, and bank statements showed dividends from Enysn had been diverted into offshore accounts instead of disbursed, millions of dollars of profits siphoned off and gone forever.  Stealing from stockholders was one of the most heinous financial crimes in Metra Region, punishable with up to several decades in a hard labor camp.  Whoever knew about these documents would take action to keep them from coming to attention, whatever the cost.

Adam wasn’t sure what he was experiencing.  Nate still hadn’t answered him.  Five minutes had already gone by, or had it been ten?  Twenty?  Adam had no idea how long he’d been digging through boxes.  He queried his dome for the time.  Minor tritone, command not recognized.  He tried to access the messages from Nate.  The sound repeated.  He stood and took two steps outside of the cubicle, fingers against the bubble under his right ear in a vain attempt to improve the recognition.  No commands worked.

He turned and stepped back toward where the boxes had been.  He was shocked to find that the floor had disappeared.  His left foot passed through the plane where it expected to find purchase, the rest of his body following close behind.  Adam fell rapidly down a dark, hollow cylinder until a round light appeared in the distance below him, painful and brilliant, directly in his path.  He closed his eyes instinctively as he rushed toward the surface, but his eyelids did nothing to block the terrible pain as the intensity increased.

When Adam was sure he could take no more, the light vanished into darkness.  He opened his eyes and at the same moment inhaled so sharply that the back of his throat felt as if it were being raked with a stick.  After Adam blinked several times he noticed a taste in the back of his throat, raw and earthy, almost a smell.  He found himself on his back, his head against his pillow, at home with his arms at his sides.  He reached up and found he was not wearing his dome.  He saw it next to him on the table by his bed, beside his notetab, where he had apparently left them, though he couldn’t recall doing so.

Not wanting to aggravate the headache he felt forming at his temples, Adam grabbed the notetab and pulled up the page about Ensyn his dome had read to him in the dream.  Adam shuddered as he read the words on the screen:

“
Ensyn Energy was founded by Drs. Freeman and Graeme.  Originally specializing in biomass petroleum, the company diversified into other areas . . .
”

Adam looked up several court cases he remembered from the dream and they all seemed to exist.  He wondered what that meant.  He also wondered how deeply he should investigate, worried his search might raise a flag of suspicion in some data-mining algorithm scanning for illicit mesh activity.  Adam confirmed enough details from the boxes in his dream to imply that the rest of what he had seen in them was also true.

Are those documents real?
Adam could not help but ask himself as he lay staring at the ceiling.  The last time he’d dreamed about paper it turned out not to exist, and he had no idea why this paper would be any different, except the things he’d seen referred to actual places and events.  The documents—documents he didn’t possess and couldn’t prove as real—also showed corruption was coming from the top down, through Metra Corp and its subsidiaries. 
Are the boxes really at Adaptech in Nate’s cubicle
, Adam wondered as he lay in bed,
or was that symbolic imagery of an authority figure?

Adam finally fell asleep in the beginning of the morning, three hours before his alarm was set to pain him.  He went into work early the next day to go straight to Nate’s desk, only to find it was where it had always been, arranged exactly as he remembered it from when he worked in that department.  There were no boxes in sight.  All he found was Nate Taylor, as pleasant as ever.

“To what do I owe this occasion?” Nate asked with a look of delight.  “You really should come to visit more often.”

“I know, I know,” Adam said, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender.  “I’m a terrible former employee.  I didn’t really want anything, but I had a weird dream and you were in it.  In the dream, you sent me a memo that I never got, or at least never read.  I came into work early so I could figure it out, but when I came to meet you at your desk it was gone.”

“Gone? Hmm,” Nate said, rubbing his chin.  “Not that I know of.  Still here every morning when I come in.  Was there anything in place of my desk?”

“No,” Adam lied, not wanting to discuss the contents of the boxes with Nate or anyone else.  “Just an empty desk.”

“Ah,” his former boss said shrewdly.  Adam felt Nate knew he was lying.  As if providing him a chance for honesty, Nate asked, “Well, what was the memo about?”

“Ever heard of Ensyn Energy?” Adam asked.  “It was something to do with a presentation.  I never found out if we were giving a presentation
to
Ensyn or
about
Ensyn.  I never even saw the actual memo.”

Nate shrugged and gestured to a stack of papers at the far edge of his desk.  “Tell me about it.  I’m pretty sure some of the memos on the bottom pre-date your tenure at Adaptech.  It’s hard to keep up sometimes.”

Adam chuckled.  “Even worse as a manager, as I’m sure you know,” he said with a wink.  “I just had to check it out.  Sorry to bother you.”

“Not a bother at all, Adam,” Nate said.  “Thanks for coming by.  Don’t wait so long to visit next time.”

They shook hands and Adam went to room 4C to begin his workday.

In the week after the election there were scattered riots, most of them small and spent within a period of several days, but the newly elected government had not marked the end of civilization, contrary to the most dire predictions of the loser’s supporters.  Eleven months, gone in a blur, had put the Regions in more precarious positions. Cascadia Corp’s CEO started his third term and continued the aggressive expansion east that had been the hallmark of Cascadian policy for the past two decades, in sharp contrast to the Cascadian Charter goals of “Peace and Prosperity through Unity”. 

The Confederacy had ousted its president, an elderly, devout man who had spent the last three five-year terms focused on religious doctrine, setting up what he believed to be the dominoes that would one day fall and lead to the return of his warrior deity.  While he focused on scripture and prophecy, the citizens of Arizona voted by an almost four-to-one margin to adopt the Cascadia Charter and escape the dismal economy brought about by the President’s lack of fiscal responsibility.  The remaining voters in the Confederacy had approved a rising star from the business class, a bespectacled man whose squinting eyes suggested a shrewd approach to governance.  The would-be preacher-king had been replaced by a smooth-talking, smiling suit who promised prosperity through increased dealings with the Cascadia and Metra Regions.  The United States had continued their economic free fall, ceding more territory to their geographic bookends on each coast, reportedly pulled under by the costs of their social programs and fiscal mismanagement.  This stood in stark contrast to the prevailing attitude in the Corp Regions, where financial solvency was the primary goal, along with the acquisition of profit, the poor viewed as inconvenient baggage.  The consensus in the Corp Regions was that the poor deserved their lot in life due to bad decision-making and laziness, at least according to the media.  Otherwise, why would they be poor?