“I did most of the programming of the demo video.”
“Where did you learn to code?”
“I’m teaching myself.”
Victor marked out the “9” and wrote “10.” “Why do you need Qubit’s Incubator?”
“For a place to work. And I’ll need electronic test equipment, too.”
“Why can’t you work at home?”
“I share a small apartment with a roomie who loves to party and make lots of noise.”
“You don’t party and make noise?”
“I used to.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“No other place to live?”
“I can’t afford a place by myself, or the equipment I need.”
“Your parents?”
“Not an option.”
“Do you have a job?”
She nodded.
“How much do you make?”
Catalina hesitated, wrinkling her brow as she gazed at a picture on the wall behind Victor. It was a large horizontal oval containing Egyptian hieroglyphs. The symbols were embossed characters chiseled into stone.
“I work in a café.” Die with…She tried to work out the translation. “With extra shifts and tips, I clear around four thousand a month.” Die with what?
“And you can’t get your own place on that?”
“I have…um…other expenses.” Die with memories…but what is that last part?
He marked out the “10” and went back to “8.” “What are they?”
“Why do you need to know all this?”
“Miss Saylor, do you want help from the Incubator?”
“Of course I do.”Dreams!
“Then I need enough information to make a decision. If you’re over your head in credit card debt and all you can do is make minimum payments, you’ll never get out from under that load of debt working at a café.”
Die with memories, not dreams. She smiled. All within a perfect oval frame.
She took a deep breath, examined her nails for a moment, then exhaled. “I dated a guy for almost a year. I thought we had a future together, but he tricked me into running my four credit cards up to the limit, then when we couldn’t charge anything more, he bailed on me.”
Victor lined through the “8” and wrote “10” again. “You see that door?” He pointed across the room, opposite from the door the young woman had opened earlier.
Her shoulders slumped. She nodded. “You’re rejecting me?”
“Go through that door, pick out a vacant desk, and get organized. Then–”
Catalina squealed with delight, jumped from the chair, and stepped to the end of his desk. “I’m accepted?! I can’t believe it. Can I hug you?”
“No. As I was saying, come back to see me at four this afternoon. Now, wipe that smile off your face and go find a desk. You’ve got thirty days to prove yourself.”
“Yes, sir.” She actually did wipe her hand across her broad smile, leaving behind a serious frown. “I’m on it.” She hurried toward the door.
Victor smiled as he made a note on the edge of her application—30 days.
Chapter Two
Catalina pushed open the door to find a large warehouse. She stepped inside, letting the door close silently behind her.
The place had apparently been some sort of assembly factory many years ago.
The underside of the corrugated ceiling was about seventy feet above her head. Twenty feet up, a wide balcony ran along the sides of the building. Many doors lined the outside perimeter of the balcony. A few were open, but she couldn’t see inside the rooms.
A large block-and-tackle hung from a steel girder. A metal hook, the size of a wrestler’s arm, was suspended below the rusting block on a rusting chain. Someone had hung a large doll from the hook.
Catalina tilted her head and squinted at the doll, which had a noose around its neck.
Is that Donald Trump?
The central open area of the huge floor had thirty desks placed haphazardly about. Most were occupied by men and women concentrating on their computers or building models of strange devices.
One young man glanced up at her, then returned to assembling a tall Tinker Toy gadget on his desk.
Surrounding the open area was a collection of cubicle work areas. She saw several rows of these cubicles, forming semicircles around and away from the open area, like an amphitheater. She could see into some of them, and most were occupied.
Find a vacant desk, he said.
Catalina walked through the open area, passing around a few cleared desks.
It’s so quiet in here.
Someone coughed. A chair squeaked. No other sounds could be heard. But there was an air of intensity about the place, like a classroom during a calculus exam.
She came to an unoccupied cubicle. She placed her iPad on the cleared desk and tried the chair. Leaning back, she gazed about at the blank walls of the workspace.
Just needs a few pictures to…
“Hey, Pissant.”
She almost fell over backwards. “W-what?” Looking up, she saw a young Black woman peeking over the wall.
“Pissants live in the bullpen,” the woman said. “You don’t become a drone until you’ve accomplished something.”
“Drone?”
“This cubicle don’t belong to you.” The Black woman disappeared.
Did she call me a ‘pissant?’
Catalina collected her iPad and went to the open area of the bullpen.
She found a desk with a Scotch tape dispenser, stapler, pencils, and an old-school computer.
Sitting at the desk, she opened her iPad and searched for a Wi-Fi connection.
“What’re you doing?”
She jerked around to see a scruffy old man with one hand on his hip and the other holding a steaming cup of coffee.
“I-I-I’m…”
“I-I-I’m…” he mocked her in a singsong voice. “Get out of my chair.”
Catalina grabbed her iPad, stood, and backed away. “Sorry.”
“Over there.”
The old man pointed with his coffee cup toward the edge of the bullpen, where a gray metal desk and matching chair stood like salvaged government-issued office furniture relegated to the outliers.
She went to the desk, and when she sat in the chair, she could feel the cold metal through the fabric of her skirt.
The desk was turned away from the others in the bullpen, facing a brick wall that looked more like a weathered outside wall than the inside of a building.
Her hand, as if by its own accord, felt for the pocket in her skirt. Slipping her hand into the pocket, her fingers searched for something. When they touched the smooth surface of one of the objects, she smiled.
High above was a large skylight providing a view of the blue sky, but only a dim gray glow came through the ages of caked-on grime.
Opening her iPad, Catalina searched again for a Wi-Fi signal. Finally, she found ‘Qubit Inc.’ The curser blinked, then a message popped up, demanding, ‘PASSWORD.’
She looked over her shoulder at the other pissants. They’re not going to be any help.
The ‘low battery’ LED began to blink on her iPad.
She saw an electrical outlet embedded in the brick wall, twenty feet away. She took the charging cord from her purse.
Six feet long. How am I going to reach that outlet? Move the desk? Glancing at the others, she shook her head. Invisible little pissant. That’s all I am. Do I really want to do this? At least at home I can charge up my computer and get online.
Turning back to her iPad, she tried ‘qubit’ for a password, then ‘Victor,’ but neither was acceptable.
If I try a third time, it might lock…
“Bullpen.”
Catalina turned to see a man standing behind her. “What the hell? I took a cubicle, and someone told me to go to the bullpen. I went there and found a desk. Then some snippy guy told me to get out of his chair and come over here. So now I guess this is your desk and I have to go back to the middle of the floor and wait to see if any desk remains unused. Why is everyone so mean in this place?”
The man smiled, watching her smolder.
“Well, at least you can smile,” she said, then closed her computer and rolled up the power cord.
He was about thirty-five, heavyset, with a shaved head and thick black beard. His faded blue shirt had long sleeves buttoned at the wrist.
He toyed with a red rubber band using a sleight-of-hand trick where the rubber band seemed to flip from one pair of fingers to the other two when he folded them into his palm, then opened them. Using his thumb so smoothly in his palm, it almost seemed like magic as the band jumped back and forth.