It was out of the question that Corvallis Kawasaki would just stroll in on short notice and sign the boilerplate NDA that the security guard would present to him. Therefore it went without saying that he was going to be issued a mere sticker, not a badge, and that he’d have to be accompanied by Ben at all times. They’d be restricted to visitor-friendly zones on the building’s lower levels. There were a few meeting rooms for just such occasions, but a glance through their glass walls proved that those were all spoken for at the moment. Therefore Ben and C-plus, having nowhere else to go, began to wander through a permanent museum exhibit that occupied the interior of the first three stories.
This looked expensive. It had not just been thrown together by interns. One sensed that serious people had come over from London and worked on it for years. It was intended to be here for a long time. Wordy plaques, etched in mysterious corrosion-proof metal, explained deep background that struck C-plus as very interesting; he’d have to come back later and actually read them. But the quick visual takeaway, absorbed by some background process in his brain as he ambled around and made small talk with Ben, was that the deep history of this institution reached all the way back to some era of history when men wore large periwigs—not the white-powdered George Washington kind, but normal hair colors—and that there were connections, on the math-and-science side, to Pascal and Leibniz, and on the money side to an old banking dynasty called the Hacklhebers, and politically to—could that really be Peter the Great? Somehow that had come together in an institution called the Leibniz-Archiv, in Hanover, which frankly hadn’t done a heck of a lot for a few hundred years.
The designers of this exhibit had cleverly filled in that awkward gap with some material about early mechanical computers, including a working replica of Babbage’s difference engine (built in a fit of nerd energy, and later contributed to this museum, by a different local tech magnate). There was the obligatory shrine to Ada Lovelace and then a fast-forward to the mid-twentieth century and a black-and-white photo of the young Alan Turing, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, and Rudolf von Hacklheber on a bicycling expedition. This was where C-plus began to feel he was losing the thread, since the last mention of any Hacklhebers he’d seen was from 250 years earlier—but apparently this Rudolf was one of those hyperprivileged white guys who actually turned out to have legit mathematical talent. Anyway it kicked off a whole wing of the exhibit featuring an offbeat mix of stuff C-plus had seen in twenty other museums (Enigma machine, photograph of Turing bombe) with unique exhibits such as a computer that Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had apparently made out of organ pipes and mercury-filled U-tubes.
There was a big map of the world festooned with swooping trails of LEDs and flat-panel monitors, trying to convey some elaborate chain of events in which the contents of the Leibniz-Archiv had been removed from Hanover, either to keep these priceless relics safe from Allied bombing raids or because Göring wanted to melt it all down, and somehow made their way, via U-boat, to the Philippines—only to be sunk, and later recovered by Waterhouses and Shaftoes.
The point being that the hoard consisted of gold plates with holes punched in them, like an early version of IBM punch cards, and they were meant to be used in a mechanical computer called the Logic Mill. The Logic Mill had been much talked about, by various savants, since the era of Oliver Cromwell, but had never really been constructed and made to work properly until Randy Waterhouse—one of the founders of the Weird Cyber Bank—had plowed some of his windfall into actually building a working replica. This had taken more than a decade because, to make a long story short, the eighteenth-century design made very little sense on a mechanical engineering level and required a lot of humans to move things around. And yet they had made it work using the actual, original plates from the Leibniz-Archiv.
And it was this detail that finally afforded Ben and C-plus a bit of privacy in which to have a real conversation. For an inner layer of even higher security surrounded the chamber housing the Logic Mill. Casual museum strollers could view it at a distance through a heavy glass window, but if you actually wanted to go in and see the thing working you had to check your bag and your coat and go through a metal detector and a pat-down. And that was enough of a barrier that most visitors were content just to look at it through the glass. Ben and Corvallis, however, went through and found themselves alone in a sunken vault (they sealed it up at night) with a contraption that slowly but inexorably shuffled gold plates around and probed them with metal pins.
“It’s on the Internet!” Ben said, indicating a flat-panel screen suspended on a jointed arm. Lines of text were marching up it so slowly that the display appeared to be frozen most of the time. Corvallis recognized them as low-level Internet codes.
“Of course it is,” he said numbly.
“In their retirement some of the OG Epiphyte geeks figured out how to program the Logic Mill to speak TCP, and gave it its own IP address—you can ping it if you have a lot of time on your hands.”
They stood there for a minute or two, watching the Logic Mill work, deriving a kind of calm satisfaction from the way the metal prods engaged the cards. When it seemed the time was right, C-plus said: “So. Elmo Shepherd.”
“El’s a true believer,” Ben replied.
Ben was in a T-shirt: swag from an early release of T’Rain, well worn in, with a dime-sized moth hole above his right nipple. Corvallis did not have to ask to understand that Ben had made a conscious choice to put it on this morning as a way of remembering Richard Forthrast, who’d given Ben his first job after Ben had been thrown out of Princeton. Ben had a round face, curly brown hair, hadn’t shaved in a while.
“You’ve met El?”
“Sat in on a bunch of meetings with him.”
“Why?”
“A couple of years ago he was hanging around here, trying to make something happen between us and ELSH. Once it got past the flirting stage, the powers that be here at WABSI realized they needed a programmer in the room, just to make sense of what he was proposing.”
“That surprises me a little,” Corvallis said. “I thought El was all about stuff like ion-beam scanning. The connectome. How to collect the data, how to store it in the cloud.”
“Stuff that’s not my department, you mean.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, he’s looking beyond that,” Ben said, and took a swig of his flat white. “In a way, that’s the part of it he’s least comfortable with, right?”
“Because he’s a bit-basher.”
“Yeah. He had to stretch quite a bit to get his head around the biology.”
“That’s kind of reflected in his whole basic approach, come to think of it,” Corvallis said.
“I know, right? The Ephrata Cryonics guys were all about physical preservation of the body. Bringing that particular piece of meat back to life.” Ben waved his hand, pantomiming El Shepherd trying to wave that idea into oblivion. “Not El’s thing at all. No. Turn it into bits. As soon as possible. Throw the meat away.” He gestured emphatically toward the Logic Mill, a wild look on his face, mocking the kind of person who would look at such a machine and say, Now, there’s a proper brain!