Watching the cascade of virtual playing cards bounce across the screen, he imagined the possible clues for which the Jeopardy! answer was: “What is George’s job?” He knew what he hoped it was: help create the world’s first truly general artificial intelligence as opposed to all the narrow AIs dominating the headlines. He checked his email again to see if it brought news of such an assignment—or some kind of work important enough to warrant having his own office. And at the same time, he was worried too. He was barely sixteen after all, and here he was, down the hall from guys who could light up and trace every neuron in the brain. A few weeks from now, would he be taking snapshots of someone’s thoughts or helping the blind to not just see, but see through walls?
Agitated malaise. Anxious ennui. That’s what George was feeling. And while in concept, a door was a nice thing to have, in reality, when you had nothing to do behind that door but twiddle your thumbs and wait, it meant claustrophobia on top. The unspecified pressure was finally enough to send George into the hallway and down to the free vending machines. A Snickers and chugged Red Bull later, he started tracing the previous day’s tour backward, hoping for something to catch his eye.
Gym? No.
Climbing wall? No.
Too early for the cafeteria.
Too much caffeine already to make use of the free coffee bar.
Neck massage station? Nope. He’d feel guilty, not having coded jack since getting there.
And then he found it: a 1980s arcade-themed conversation room where a few people were sitting in club chairs, complete with fully functioning, stand-alone versions of Pong, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Asteroids, Frogger. All had started gathering dust in actual arcades well before any of the coders ignoring them had been born, including George. By all appearances, they were more of a meta gesture, a nod toward the idea of nostalgia; no one expected anyone to actually play them, as attested to by the “Wash Me” somebody had written in the dust coating the cathode-ray screen of the Pac-Man console.
But George had always had a soft spot in his heart for the underdogs, the neglected, the underestimated—all of those labels having applied to him at various points. And so he pulled his hand into his sleeve and wiped the Pac-Man display clean. He hit the big red button to start a game and flinched when actual music—the dinky-dink Pac-Man theme—came pouring out rather louder than he had expected. The handful of fellow coders in the room turned to look at him.
“I’m not sure you’re supposed to actually use those,” one of them said. “I think they’re, like, for decoration.”
“Yeah, dude,” another said, “that’s some serious museum antique stuff you’re messing with.”
George looked at the happy yellow pie missing a slice, waiting to be sent on his gobbling way as the quartet of sawtooth-sheeted ghosts bobbed in their 2-D holding pen, waiting to cause trouble. “Why were they plugged in,” George asked, “if we’re not supposed to use them?”
The two previous speakers looked at each other, then at George, who was already riding his joystick like a pro. “Good point,” one of them said.
“Ya wanna?” his colleague asked him. And then up they went to play Pong, ironically, until a supervisor came looking for them.
Wow, George thought, first day, and I’m already the guy who gets other guys in trouble—a conclusion he’d have cause to rethink once he met the guy who actually held that particular job description.
The Quire cafeteria could have been decorated by the set designer for Blade Runner, but with fewer rain effects and minus the grit. A multiculti mash-up heavily inflected eastward: the cafeteria’s most prominent feature was a series of wall-sized flat screens displaying seasonal scenes of what the outside would look like if humans had never taken a shovel to it. An overall tranquil vibe, George thought, except for the foot-tall crawl cutting through the sublime vistas to display the weather forecast, breaking news, Quire’s stock price, or its latest corporate affirmation.
George had taken a seat toward the back, the better to study his coworkers, when he noticed an old-timer enter the cafeteria, distinguished by his actual badge swinging from a lanyard around his neck. George had already observed that much about QHQ’s pecking order: employees could be divided into badgers and chippers, the latter representing the newest hires while the former had been given the option to hold on to their old badges. And this one seemed to be on a mission as he stared at his phone, in medias distractus, looking up only once to lock on George. A quick, confirmatory nod followed by a big smile as he continued walking with a bit more purpose, straight for Quire’s newest newbie.
“Milo LaFarge,” he announced, phone holstered, hand out.
“George,” George said, withholding his surname as he often did when he wasn’t in the mood.
And so Milo pulled out a seat, sat down, and filled in the blank. “Jedson, right?”
George nodded.
“Man, that must be a pain in the butt.”
George blinked self-consciously. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.”
“Why don’t you change it?”
“How else am I supposed to start conversations?”
“Say no more,” Milo said, and George obeyed as if it had been a command.
Several uncomfortable seconds passed as the newbie poked among the remains of his lunch and considered taking out his phone, the international sign for “leave me alone.”
“Listen,” Milo said, unambiguously a command this time, “I’m here to help.”
“Help?” George said, looking up from a crescent of gluten-free, vegan-certified pizza crust he’d flicked into rotating like an ad hoc fidget spinner.
“I’m your Virgil,” Milo said.
George looked perplexed. “I thought you said your name was Milo?”
Milo crossed his arms and rocked back in his seat. George mirrored the gesture. And the two stayed that way, tentatively teetering on the back legs of their chairs, judging and daring and testing each other’s will until George finally broke, tipped forward, and admitted that yes, he knew who Virgil was. “I just don’t see how the allusion applies in our current situation.”
“I’m your alternative tour guide,” Milo said, “here to point things out you might otherwise miss.”
“Like?” George asked.
Milo pinched his smart ID between thumb and forefinger and held it away from him so they both could see the stitched lettering running from end to end of the lanyard. “Doing good is a choice,” he read aloud.
It was the corporate affirmation of the week and had struck George as a benign declaration of corporate altruism, an interpretation he shared with his guest.
Milo held the strip of polyester closer, reading it silently like a fortune cookie. “It could also mean that ‘doing good’ is optional,” he pointed out.
George weighed the words one at a time. “You could be right,” he finally admitted.
“And so it begins,” Milo said, cracking all his knuckles at once.
17
Pandora didn’t hate everything about high school, though in terms of learning, it was highly inefficient. She could read a teacher’s edition much faster than it took to have it read to her aloud by some secondary-ed-majoring hack who couldn’t make it down south, leaving her plenty of time to twiddle her thumbs between acing quizzes. There was one exception, however: Mr. Vlasic, her science teacher.