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>> Quad World About the novel: Dummar Aircraft Co, Research Lab
Opening the conference room door and stepping in from the fluorescent brightness of the hallway, I walked into the shadow-filled room. Running my hand along the wall I flicked on the lights and walked directly over to the room's bay window. Perched high in the hills, the lab hand an unbroken view of ten miles of California coastline. Breakers rolled in, crashing against the sea wall that protected the multi-million-dollar beach homes of the Malibu Colony. Far out beyond the white water, out where the sea glimmered gold and orange, one lone surfer bobbed in the swell. Ting ting... I flicked off my watch's alarm and tossed the folder that had been tucked under my arm onto the conference room's table. It slid several feet before coming to rest on the high-gloss lacquer surface. The Silicon Integrated Circuits lab status meeting was permanently fixed in time and space: always held in the Walnut Conference Room and always called for eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning. Same station, same time, and unfortunately usually the same, meaningless problems discussed. Sitting, I switched on the overhead projector that was sunk into the tabletop. Behind me, a projector screen dropped from the ceiling and covered the bay window. I slipped my first transparency onto the overhead, looked over my shoulder, and twiddled with the focus knob until I got some minimal level of crispness. Leaning back in the Naugahyde chair, I propped my feet up onto the corner of the table. Since I'd never been able to start the meeting before eight-forty, I had at least eight minutes to kill. I stared at my feet. My brown leather wingtips looked like shit. I'd bought them over three years ago when I had first gotten this job, wore them every day to work, and had never bothered to shine them - not once. Shinning shoes was a waste of time. It didn't get one more circuit pushed through the lab or a single line completed for a Journal of Applied Physics paper. Normally I would not even waste the time considering the state of my shoes, but they had degraded to such an extent that it was obvious that their days were numbered. The fact that a great deal of the stitching no longer seemed to remain, and that my brown socks poked through between leather uppers and plastic soles, implied that they were on the verge of total disintegration. That mattered. My only other shoes were a pair of currently gray, but at one time white, tennis shoes. If I wore those to work I'd offend the sensibilities of the three-piece-suit crowd. In the good old days, before I had been put in charge of the Integrated Circuits lab, I would have simply considered that an added bonus. But no longer. I had become politically astute. When I pitched a program to the suits, or needed more hands in the lab, things like footwear, color-coordinated ties, and buttoned-down collars, seemed to mean more to the beancounters that ran this company than the actual technical content of my request. There was no escaping it, I'd have to get a new pair of shoes. An image filled my head. I saw myself squirming through a mall, choked full of people who were incapable of taking more than two shuffling steps forward without halting directly in my path, or even worse, pinning me up against the window of a frozen yogurt parlor, holding me captive, and then exposing me to detailed discussions that revolved around the merits of pink versus purple hair, or the grim details of stuffing a forty-two-inch ass into a thirty-six-inch pair of jeans. My stomach tightened in a knot. Suddenly my shoes didn't look quite so disgusting. With a little luck, I could probably get another few weeks out of them. Maybe, just maybe. The conference room door snapped open and images of fat asses, new wingtips, and frozen yogurt on a stick vanished. Kent Cooper lurched in. He held a Styrofoam cup in each hand. Half falling and half sitting, he seemed to collapse in a chair at the far end of the table. He blew on one of his coffees and then took a quick sip. He grimaced and his eyes narrowed to slits. Apparently the cafeteria was maintaining its high level of culinary excellence. He looked like hell, and I doubted that even two cups' worth of caffeine would make any real difference. His new baby had been home for almost a month now, and judging by his appearance his body had not yet adjusted to that organic alarm clock firing at not quite periodic two-hour intervals. "Morning," he said to me, grinning as he always did. I just grinned back at him. In many ways
I found him quite remarkable, but on mornings when he looked like this
I was in flat-out awe of him. He and his wife had survived two years with
their firs kid and, apparently having so enjoyed the pain, suffering, and
sleep-deprivation associated with the process, had opted for a second.
It was just one of the many amazing facets of his masochistic personality.
He nodded, but didn't look up. He seemed to be intently studying something floating in one of his coffees. So I left him alone and let him contemplate whatever it was he saw in his coffee. I could suddenly hear an argument in the hallway. The door eased open, then closed without anybody having entered. It opened again and a leg popped in, but a body didn't follow. I recognized that perfectly polished penny loafer digging into the shag carpet. I shook my head, trying to rattle my brain. I seemed to be suffering from a shoe fetish today. "If I don't get twenty gallons per minute of deionized water flow through those back hoods, we'll be eating silicon wafers like they were potato chips," said Jack Behnke as he hung out in the hallway. "And those chips go for eight hundred bucks a pop." "Have to redesign everything to do that," said some distant voice. "Not my problem," said Behnke, sounding somewhat happy about the pain he was inflicting. "I speced the requirements, and you guys signed up for it." "We're out of money," said the distant voice, now starting to sound panicked. I laughed quietly to myself, Behnke was obviously talking to someone from plant facilities. It was the one department at Malibu that seemed to have the unique ability to not only spend all their allocated funds before a job was completed, but on many occasions the money would evaporate to nothing before they had so much as laid a single length of pipe, or even opened up a tool box. "It has to be completed before first shift tomorrow morning," said Behnke. He walked quickly into the conference room and slammed the door behind him before anyone could tell him why that request was impossible to meet. Jogging around the end of the table, he jumped into a chair next to Cooper. His knit tie flew up and disappeared over his shoulder. "That entire department is brain-dead," he said as he smiled. Behnke possessed a dazzling set of white teeth. The tips of his over-large canines seemed to twinkle. I think his teeth maintained their high luster because of the large number of asses that he continually chewed on. The door banged open. I glanced up at the clock. It was eight-forty. Behnke shut up. Techs and the rest of the staff engineers walked in. I gave Behnke a smile that he returned. Cooper, Behnke, and myself were a team. Between us we could say anything, and most often did. But it never went beyond us. The environment at Dummar was far too political for loose lips. "I want to be out of her by nine," I said as people slowly found their seats. In actuality, I would have liked to have never been here at all. Nothing was ever really accomplished in a meeting. The real decisions were made while scurrying down a hallway or while standing captive with a section head in front of a urinal. But management was of the mindset that progress and output had a direct correlation with the number of meetings held. Actually, I tended to agree with that. But where they saw a positive correlation I saw a negative one. But mine was not to reason why, mine was but to work and die. Several had not yet seated themselves, but I wasn't about to waste any more time. Pulling a pen from my top pocket, I pointed at the first line on my overhead transparency. "I want to prioritize the circuit lost that are about to hit the nitride deposition tube, so we can open a time slot to take it down for cleaning. It's flaking so badly now that it's going to start affecting chip yields." I looked up, getting ready for the barrage I knew was about to come. Everyone was going to demand that their project deserved Number One Priority. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The room had suddenly taken on a sick green tint, and something buzzed in my ears. I didn't seem to be breathing. I tried to speak, but my lips wouldn't move. I didn't have long to consider the strangeness of all this. The room went black. And I knew what'd happened. There wasn't the slightest doubt in my mind. I had just dropped dead at the start of the eight-thirty Tuesday Silicon Integrated Circuits meeting. Unbelievable. Deaths in the workplace always peak on Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons. That was a scientific fact. I had no right to be dying on a Tuesday morning.  © robert a. metzger. All rights reserved. |
It started with an early morning staff meeting at his lab, a meeting where time - or John - froze. When the clock of his life started up again he was in an eerie future world being pursued by forces of either God or Lucifer. And as John leagued with or fought against such notables as Robin Hood, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Elvis, and Vlad the Impaler, he slowly discovered that the world was now divided into two hundred mutually exclusive Quads, peopled by the survivors of devastating biological warfare. John was discovering his own unique powers, but unless he put the puzzle together quickly, every Quad would be forever consigned to Hell. Originally published in 1991 by Penguin-ROC this book has just been reissued in trade paperback by E-reads. You can read the first 3 chapters below.