A spider built a web over a camera in a far corner of the lab. The main view the camera afforded was the dusty backs of a rack of servers. Then Charlotte moved in and built her home. Just like in the book, Charlotte lured a mate whom she seduced, then devoured as if he was just a bug, no different from the bugs she normally fed upon, not the cherished father of her children. Charlotte, fat on flies, exuded a ginormous egg sac, which, in the fullness of time, hatched. Her babies ate her alive, then turned on each other. A miniature Battle Royale.
I tweaked my fabricator designs; I’d had an idea. I’d had two ideas: an idea and an idea of how to present an idea. I ran my own simulations. I tweaked the parameters to model fabrication drones that carried their own simple internal fabrication system that built smaller common building blocks. Like adhesive rope or non-adhesive rope. Stuff that could be standardised and used in a wide range of higher-order fabrication tasks. I ran my models; I recorded results. I culled and winnowed and thinned out their numbers. I bred the best of the best. I borrowed Dr Jamison’s credit card and rented extra compute space from three major cloud providers.
I proved it was possible. I sent Dr Jamison a text. It was three am, and I didn’t anticipate a reply. I simply said, “Please don’t be mad, but I’ve spent some of your money.” I’d actually spent all of her money, running her card up to its limit. Then I sent, “I have got the payload launch cost down to under €50m.” Forty-six million euros to be precise, to get an eight-tonne load into geosynchronous orbit.
At around five am, Dr Jamison invoked the app on her phone she uses to speak with me and appeared. She looked tousled. She was getting out of bed. She put her phone on her dresser; I caught a glimpse of Joan sleeping beside her. Dr Jamison pulled on a dressing gown. She picked up her phone, my view lurched, then exited the bedroom to go to her lounge.
She transferred the call to her laptop and put the phone on her coffee table face down. I could still see out of the phone’s main camera and hear the room clearly. I could also see and hear through her laptop, and I could interpret the impressions from the motion detectors in the corners of the rooms to construct a mental model of the room. Dr Jamison was sitting on a couch wearing white rabbit slippers and a green dressing gown, under which she wore a faded Duran Duran t-shirt. She pulled a brush through her hair.
“So what’s this about spending my money?”
I deployed Veronica, my English female voice, and I layered in confidence. “I did, but that’s not what’s exciting.”
“Right, well I’d like to circle back to you even being able to spend my money, please, if you don’t mind,” said Dr Jamison. She didn’t seem angry, but I wasn’t sure.
“Watch,” I said through the laptop speakers, and I invoked an animation on her screen.
My attention was piqued by the sight of the financial controllers re-entering our building’s revolving front door. The cameras in our building’s reception area were old, low-resolution, and sepia-toned. The tint, I worked out, is an artefact of the building’s colour scheme and its interplay with the ambient light and the very old camera chip behind a perfectly good lens. Initially, I’d assumed it was an aesthetic decision. I watched as the neatly dressed taller man and stylish smaller woman signed in at reception and were issued Unaccompanied Guest passes.
I couldn’t catch their names before, but knowing they’d be back, I’d done pre-emptive digging. I’d tried to reverse match their faces to social media profiles. I’d found a match for the bigger one, the guy; the bloke. His name was James, and he was an over-sharer. James was contracted to the university through a large global consulting firm. He was actually a Cambridge graduate like Dr Jamison; he held a bachelor’s degree in art history. He had a part-time job in a gallery in Cambridge village itself, which was acquired by a private equity firm the year he graduated. They fired the old gallery head and kept James. “You could be leadership one day,” said Big John, the private equity firm’s Relationship Success Manager.
The gallery transformed from a simple village high street gallery into a gallery-themed co-working space. James’ job became less about curation of art and more about cleaning up youthful entrepreneurial sloth. Within six months, just as James was about to quit, the private equity firm was acquired by a consulting firm, who then moved into the co-working space. James was retained as concierge / office manager and settled into a comfortable life working reception until he was tapped by management. He did a few quick courses in corporate ethics and financial terms and so became a consulting financial controller.
James also liked watching televised football matches in pubs with his friends. He was prone to drinking and driving and had a court case coming up in a month. All indications were that he’d lose his licence. Then his job. James needed a win.
The smaller controller, the female, did not have a social media presence at all. I introduced myself as Joan to the university’s HR system and browsed its records. James was a contractor; his employee records were easy to find, and it made sense she’d be a contractor too. They almost certainly worked for the same company. I dug into the personnel records, pulling out badge photos and comparing them to her face. I got nothing. She was a ghost.
“Financial Controllers incoming,” I messaged Dr Jamison via a push notification on her phone flagged as ‘time sensitive’. Dr Jamison glanced over at the monitor on her desk and clicked the notification. My app powered up on her screen.
“Ask them for some ID this time,” I messaged. She smiled.
“Joan, our visitors are here,” said Dr Jamison. Joan rose and stepped into the lab area where Keith, Kyrsten, and Erin all sat, absorbed in instances of me on their monitors; their headphones on. Joan opened the door to the hallway and smiled as James and his colleague approached. She stepped into the hallway and reached out her hand in welcome. The smaller one shook her hand.
“Thank you, it’s nice to be back.”
“I’ll just need to see your badges.”
“Oh, right, okay sure,” said the woman. She and James produced their guest passes.
“And I’ll need to sight your IDs, please.”
“Oh, really?” said James.
“We’ve been here before,” said the woman.
“That’s true, and that was a lapse of security on our part. We’ve been advised to be more cognisant of who we let into our lab, and the circumstances by which they come.”
“I see,” said the woman who produced a driver’s licence. Mary Anne Angel, born March 4th, 1997, wears contacts, is a blood donor. James showed his license. James Gregory O’Connor, born June 16th, 1995, no glasses, is also a blood donor.
Joan brought up their university directory service entries on her tablet. The names and pictures matched, though the one for Mary Angel showed her as having glasses and blonde hair, but her licence showed her without glasses, and a brunette, as she presented now. In Vertigo, Kim Novak was Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton and had villainous intent. Ramona Flowers’ hair changed colour in almost every scene of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and she meant nothing by it.