Dawn crested harsh and sudden over campus, every furrow and sharp edge straked by long shadows that emerged like carnivorous animals rising for the hunt. The lawns and walkways were now dotted by spandex-clad joggers treading the broken dreams of graduate students making their way back to their hovels after another disappointing all nighter.
Early risers, these types. Always a bad omen.
Inside, my office resembled a particularly nasty suite wrecking. The kind Holiday Inn uses in its training videos. Suspicious ceiling stains. Overturned room service carts. Broken furniture. Dirty water covered the floor up to our ankles. A dangerous soup of empty clamshell packaging, office supplies, animal bones, stapled manuscripts, and 50 years of dissolved toxic chemical buildup. It was prudent to step carefully. Strike a spark and something dreadful would surely rise from this primordial ooze.
But it didn't matter. We had successfully translated two Ivy League educations and enough caffeinated beverage to stun a mule deer into a carefully formatted grant application. It was nothing less than a mission plan to save humanity. Sequencing the DNA of the American Dream. Now all it required was a budget. That would require a courier.
"Where is that grad student?" I asked. "What have you done with him, you sick bastard?"
My postdoc was sitting cross-legged on the bench dressed in a sarong he had fashioned from a lab coat. He was methodically converting a box of Kimwipes into an origami dinosaur army.
"I sent him to Kinkos," he said and swallowed.
"The twenty four hour Kinkos."
I had forgotten what transpired in those final terrible hours. Now, it all came rushing back. The fear. The struggle. The noises. It was the return of the steam engine for John Henry, but this time it was out for white-collar blood.
The AirBook had given its life for the cause. It sat in the corner a smoking ruin, still hot to the touch. What you might imagine Pompeii looked like just after the screaming had stopped. The display was transformed into a Rorschach depicting some unconscious unspeakable. The case, once an exemplary specimen of state of the art Pacific Rim plastic injection molding, had lost all semblance of Euclidean geometry. The straight lines no longer orthogonal, the edges sagging like something in a Dali painting. The Persistence of Computation. The keyboard had fused, the individual keys no longer capable of discrimination. Pressing any one of them brought forth the alphabet entire, and a flanged whimpering that was unmistakably cursing my postdoc and I for what we had done. A plea to the binary gods. Bring vengeance down upon these soft bipeds! it cried.
This was the least of our problems.
Many hours earlier the office printer had begun dry heaving, as if some cosmic page count had been reached. From then on, all that emerged from its gaping maw were pages pristine and empty as they had been since cut from virgin timber in the rain forests of the Yucatan. Something had gone wonky inside the vile device.
"We're going to have to open it," my postdoc said blandly.
"What do you mean, open it?" I asked. "Is that even possible? Is it wise?"
This was no ordinary laser printer. I had purchased it from a band of gypsies camped behind one of the lesser conferences. Priced to move, a swarthy man with a heavy accent had promised. It seemed a good deal at the time. Then they mysteriously started disappearing all across eastern Europe after Chernobyl. Freak coincidence, I thought. A correlation proving nothing.
We carefully probed the silent husk looking for its weak spot. Underneath was an access panel. It carried a warning written in bold red Cyrillic, each sentence terminating in a string of exclamation points. As if the wrong unqualified were to break the seal, Magog himself would rise. The panel was secured by custom screw heads embossed with some sort of Hindu cuneiform. These could be bypassed only by a certified technician. Or, with a Dremmel tool and copious application of liquid nitrogen, my postdoc concluded.
So be it. We assembled our tools and steeled ourselves for the backlash. It would be like coaxing kidney stones from the urethra of a slumbering grizzly using a bicycle spoke. Just a precious few moments to work before it woke in pain and anger and looking for someone to blame. No safety goggles needed here. If things went south, it was best to get it over quick.
"Ready?" my postdoc asked in a shaky voice.
I pondered what the radiation would do to us. Perhaps the ensuing mutation would bestow some coveted ability like flight or long division.
"You understand your NRSA doesn't include health insurance." I thought he should know. At least my conscious would be clear when I met with his next of kin.
Too late for that now. He revved the Dremel as if he were at the starting gate of the Mint 400. The burr tip became a floret blur, hardened capitalist steel about to test the surplus pig iron of the Warsaw Pact, a literal clash of civilizations. Casualties were a given.
Suddenly, a chipper voice broke the tension. "Here's the copies," the chipper voice said. We lowered our weapons.
It was the grad student. Was I hallucinating? Was it a ghost? I thought he had long since bolted the lab. But there he stood, joined by a half dozen copies of the grant collated in fresh boxes stamped with a Kinkos logo. He stacked them neatly on the bench and crowned the stack with a flash drive, the vendor contact information long since faded.
"The building was locked, so I came in through the steam tunnels," he said.
"Good work, lad," I replied, only because I didn't know his name. "That's the sort of nimble thinking that will keep you out of prison." I checked the floor around his feet to see if he were leaking any vital fluids. He appeared to be intact.
The backup plan had succeeded. Unexpectedly, but succeeded nonetheless.
It had been an audacious plan. Ugly real estate surrounded campus. Venturing out at this hour was a death sentence, like exiting a Baghdad green zone riding a pogo stick and shouting disparagements to Muhammad. Inside the wire, campus police cannot guarantee your safety. Outside the wire, they won't even come looking for the parts.
The 24-hour Kinkos commanded the high ground in this forsaken realm, an eye on the distant horizon. It was the only structure for miles that had power, the lights kept on by corporate chutzpa and a matrix of diesel generators bolted to the roof surrounded by razor wire. This citadel drew to it every manner of walking dead from the surrounding neighborhoods. Junkies, rapists, murderers. Undergraduates. They pressed against the windows and stared open-mouthed at the rhythmic machinery inside. When the office printer had rebelled, when my postdoc handed the boy a flash drive and bid him there as plan B should our repair efforts fail, I figured we'd never see him again. Yet, he had returned. Prodigal son.
Graduate students. You can spend your whole life studying them and they still surprise you with their resilience.
The boy waved a receipt. "Who do I give this to?" My postdoc snatched it from his hand like a raptor taking a field mouse.
The finish line, previously nothing more than a mirage, seemed to be within our grasp. What was once an endurance test had become a race. We had a hardcopy of the grant proposal in hand. Now all it required was a budget. That would require a courier. But not the grad student. No, we had already asked too much of him. He had already got us out of one tight spot. It was best not to tempt fate a second time.
"Get dressed," I said to my postdoc. "And put those goddamn dinosaurs away."
"We're going to the bad place."
Continue to Part IV
Early risers, these types. Always a bad omen.
Inside, my office resembled a particularly nasty suite wrecking. The kind Holiday Inn uses in its training videos. Suspicious ceiling stains. Overturned room service carts. Broken furniture. Dirty water covered the floor up to our ankles. A dangerous soup of empty clamshell packaging, office supplies, animal bones, stapled manuscripts, and 50 years of dissolved toxic chemical buildup. It was prudent to step carefully. Strike a spark and something dreadful would surely rise from this primordial ooze.
But it didn't matter. We had successfully translated two Ivy League educations and enough caffeinated beverage to stun a mule deer into a carefully formatted grant application. It was nothing less than a mission plan to save humanity. Sequencing the DNA of the American Dream. Now all it required was a budget. That would require a courier.
"Where is that grad student?" I asked. "What have you done with him, you sick bastard?"
My postdoc was sitting cross-legged on the bench dressed in a sarong he had fashioned from a lab coat. He was methodically converting a box of Kimwipes into an origami dinosaur army.
"I sent him to Kinkos," he said and swallowed.
"The twenty four hour Kinkos."
I had forgotten what transpired in those final terrible hours. Now, it all came rushing back. The fear. The struggle. The noises. It was the return of the steam engine for John Henry, but this time it was out for white-collar blood.
The AirBook had given its life for the cause. It sat in the corner a smoking ruin, still hot to the touch. What you might imagine Pompeii looked like just after the screaming had stopped. The display was transformed into a Rorschach depicting some unconscious unspeakable. The case, once an exemplary specimen of state of the art Pacific Rim plastic injection molding, had lost all semblance of Euclidean geometry. The straight lines no longer orthogonal, the edges sagging like something in a Dali painting. The Persistence of Computation. The keyboard had fused, the individual keys no longer capable of discrimination. Pressing any one of them brought forth the alphabet entire, and a flanged whimpering that was unmistakably cursing my postdoc and I for what we had done. A plea to the binary gods. Bring vengeance down upon these soft bipeds! it cried.
This was the least of our problems.
Many hours earlier the office printer had begun dry heaving, as if some cosmic page count had been reached. From then on, all that emerged from its gaping maw were pages pristine and empty as they had been since cut from virgin timber in the rain forests of the Yucatan. Something had gone wonky inside the vile device.
"We're going to have to open it," my postdoc said blandly.
"What do you mean, open it?" I asked. "Is that even possible? Is it wise?"
This was no ordinary laser printer. I had purchased it from a band of gypsies camped behind one of the lesser conferences. Priced to move, a swarthy man with a heavy accent had promised. It seemed a good deal at the time. Then they mysteriously started disappearing all across eastern Europe after Chernobyl. Freak coincidence, I thought. A correlation proving nothing.
We carefully probed the silent husk looking for its weak spot. Underneath was an access panel. It carried a warning written in bold red Cyrillic, each sentence terminating in a string of exclamation points. As if the wrong unqualified were to break the seal, Magog himself would rise. The panel was secured by custom screw heads embossed with some sort of Hindu cuneiform. These could be bypassed only by a certified technician. Or, with a Dremmel tool and copious application of liquid nitrogen, my postdoc concluded.
So be it. We assembled our tools and steeled ourselves for the backlash. It would be like coaxing kidney stones from the urethra of a slumbering grizzly using a bicycle spoke. Just a precious few moments to work before it woke in pain and anger and looking for someone to blame. No safety goggles needed here. If things went south, it was best to get it over quick.
"Ready?" my postdoc asked in a shaky voice.
I pondered what the radiation would do to us. Perhaps the ensuing mutation would bestow some coveted ability like flight or long division.
"You understand your NRSA doesn't include health insurance." I thought he should know. At least my conscious would be clear when I met with his next of kin.
Too late for that now. He revved the Dremel as if he were at the starting gate of the Mint 400. The burr tip became a floret blur, hardened capitalist steel about to test the surplus pig iron of the Warsaw Pact, a literal clash of civilizations. Casualties were a given.
Suddenly, a chipper voice broke the tension. "Here's the copies," the chipper voice said. We lowered our weapons.
It was the grad student. Was I hallucinating? Was it a ghost? I thought he had long since bolted the lab. But there he stood, joined by a half dozen copies of the grant collated in fresh boxes stamped with a Kinkos logo. He stacked them neatly on the bench and crowned the stack with a flash drive, the vendor contact information long since faded.
"The building was locked, so I came in through the steam tunnels," he said.
"Good work, lad," I replied, only because I didn't know his name. "That's the sort of nimble thinking that will keep you out of prison." I checked the floor around his feet to see if he were leaking any vital fluids. He appeared to be intact.
The backup plan had succeeded. Unexpectedly, but succeeded nonetheless.
It had been an audacious plan. Ugly real estate surrounded campus. Venturing out at this hour was a death sentence, like exiting a Baghdad green zone riding a pogo stick and shouting disparagements to Muhammad. Inside the wire, campus police cannot guarantee your safety. Outside the wire, they won't even come looking for the parts.
The 24-hour Kinkos commanded the high ground in this forsaken realm, an eye on the distant horizon. It was the only structure for miles that had power, the lights kept on by corporate chutzpa and a matrix of diesel generators bolted to the roof surrounded by razor wire. This citadel drew to it every manner of walking dead from the surrounding neighborhoods. Junkies, rapists, murderers. Undergraduates. They pressed against the windows and stared open-mouthed at the rhythmic machinery inside. When the office printer had rebelled, when my postdoc handed the boy a flash drive and bid him there as plan B should our repair efforts fail, I figured we'd never see him again. Yet, he had returned. Prodigal son.
Graduate students. You can spend your whole life studying them and they still surprise you with their resilience.
The boy waved a receipt. "Who do I give this to?" My postdoc snatched it from his hand like a raptor taking a field mouse.
The finish line, previously nothing more than a mirage, seemed to be within our grasp. What was once an endurance test had become a race. We had a hardcopy of the grant proposal in hand. Now all it required was a budget. That would require a courier. But not the grad student. No, we had already asked too much of him. He had already got us out of one tight spot. It was best not to tempt fate a second time.
"Get dressed," I said to my postdoc. "And put those goddamn dinosaurs away."
"We're going to the bad place."
Continue to Part IV
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