Spheria (9 page)

“That’s awful.”

“Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Now you have much to think about, so get some rest. Tomorrow we make the trip back, and you'll face the last trial of your journey.”

Chapter 9 - First Day

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.” - Seneca

Min arrived at 10 a.m. as instructed and entered the door to the makeshift lobby. Max was sitting at the reception desk playing on his phone. Apparently, he didn’t want to risk being late on her first day.
 

“Good morning!” she said.

“Welcome aboard the Spheria Project. You ready to begin?”

“Sure am. Where should I put my things?”

Max got up and stepped aside. “This is your desk,” he said, motioning to the vacated seat.

Min looked at the reception desk. It did look comfortable and fancy with all the glass and contoured wood. But she was hoping for something more challenging than answering the phone and greeting people.

“I’m going to be a receptionist?”

“Um, no… I mean yes… uh… kind of...”

“Huh?”

“We get like one visitor a month. And we don’t have that much space. So you'll be working at this desk, and if someone happens to come in, just say hello and offer to get him or her some coffee. That’s all. I promise you we have cool projects for you to work on. But we need someone here, and all the other staff are, let’s just say, socially awkward, being scientists and all.”

“Got it, not a problem. I can deal with that.”

She placed her bag on the desk and sat down. The chair was comfortable. Three big computer screens also,
awesome
.

Max grabbed one of the lobby chairs and pulled it up next to her. “Let me show you how to log in and get to the data files. We have a team meeting at eleven so you'll have a chance to meet everyone.”

“Sounds good.”

#

When Max and Min entered the conference room, there were only two vacant seats, so they each sat in one. The rest of the team had already arrived, and Max was late as usual by five minutes.

“Sorry everyone,” he said.

The woman at the head of the table scowled at him, then turned to Min. “Hello, you must be our new intern.”

Max answered, “Yes, this is Min. She starts today.”

“Hi Min,” everyone said, almost in unison.

“We’ll do introductions in a second,” the woman said. “First, I wanted to cover some administrative details, then I’ll turn the meeting over to Max.”

Max nodded.

“So the project is fully operational now, and Graham Neilson is pleased with that news. He’s scheduling a visit with us and is excited to see everything firsthand. In case you're not aware, something like this was a dream of his since he was a kid. He just got a little distracted while becoming a billionaire. But, as they say, you’re never too old to follow your dreams.”

“True that,” said a dark-skinned woman with an African accent. Others nodded in agreement.

“I’ll let you all know exactly when he's coming so we can clean up any junk in the office. Some of you have a habit of accumulating soda cans and empty boxes, so we’ll want to clear all that out. Maybe we can throw a cleaning party and bring in some pizza or something.”

“Ugh,” said an Indian man. “I am so sick of pizza. It’s all we ever get. We should get some curried lamb.”

“No way,” said a small Italian-looking man. “I’m not eating any of your ethnic crap. We need to bring in pizza. American all the way!”

“Pizza is not American,” said the Indian.

“Dude, pizza was invented in New Haven by Frank Pepe,” he replied.

“Actually, that’s not true at all,” said a woman with glasses. “Folklore aside, it was indeed invented in Italy; Naples to be precise.”

“Regardless,” said the Italian man, “it emigrated here with my forebears and is American now, just like apple pie and Coca-Cola.”

“Curried lamb is American then also,” declared the Indian, folding his arms across his chest.

Max entered the debate. “As long as we’ve got alcohol, who cares?”

“I second that,” said the Italian. “Give me a beer and I could care less about the food.”

“Alcohol it is,” said the woman at the head of the table, “and maybe some curried lamb
and
a cheeseburger pizza!”

This got a chuckle from a few people.

“One last thing,” she said. “My goal for the next two months will be to get some public visibility for this project. So my focus is shifting from managing funding to marketing. I’ll be contacting different trade publications, websites, news sources, etc. The purpose is to spread the word that our technology is functional, and we are collecting interesting data. I may be inviting the press to take a tour of the project. We’d like to get some articles written about us if possible.”

“May I ask a question?” asked the Indian.

“Go ahead.”

“Why do we care if the public sees this project?”

“Good question. Graham isn't the sole funding source. We also have a couple of government grants helping us out. At some point, the money will run out, and we’ll be applying for extensions. The more publicity we can generate, and the more we can publish that adds value to the scientific community, the better our chances to keep going. Also, the grants we got require that the results be disclosed. I believe in doing that ‘with a splash’ in the media rather than just in specialized journals. We’ll do both, but I’m starting with the press to build hype. You each are going to be required to publish your analysis and conclusions in your respective fields, those of you who are scientists that is.”

“Understood,” said the Indian.

“Well, that’s all I have. Max, take it away.”

Max cleared his throat. “Okay, so I have a bunch of boring statistics to go over, but first, let’s help Min get to know us all better. I thought we could go around the table. Talk about your role on this team, and then to make it interesting tell us something about yourself that’s not work related. Sound good?”

“Sure,” a couple of people said. Others nodded. One shrugged.

“I’ll go first. We’ve already met, but my full name is Maximilian Moreau. I was born in France, as you can probably tell by my accent. Actually, who here wasn't born in America?” He raised his hand.

Three other hands went up. The Indian man, the African woman, and Min.

“Four to six. So we’re outnumbered. Min, where were you born?”

“Vietnam.”

“Great. Well, that gets us closer to balancing things out. Anyway, I was one of the first two members of the team along with Dana.” He motioned toward the woman at the head of the table. “I designed the Qube technology as my master’s thesis in physics. But then I dropped out of college in order not to disclose how it works. Well worth it. So I should have a master’s degree, but I don’t. I don’t care. What we’re doing here is a blast, and better than any job I could get in the real world, no pun intended.”

Groans, and nods of agreement.

“Like I said, I was born in France, Lyons specifically. I grew up on a vineyard, but it wasn’t in my blood, and my older brother was taking it over anyway. I was more engaged by the hidden mysteries of the operation, like how particles of fertilizer managed to migrate up into a pouring watering can. So I discovered my love of physics at an early age. I came to the United States to attend undergraduate school at MIT and then I just stuck around because I liked it here. A little cold, but nothing I can’t live with. Actually, there is a theory, not sure if it’s true. All the great ideas come from colder regions because people are stuck indoors and need to invent stuff not to get bored or freeze to death. In warm areas, they just go hang out at the beach. Who wouldn’t?”

The Indian man said, “India is very warm, and we are very progressive.”

“Yeah, can you name one thing invented there?”

“Of course. Radio was invented there.”

“Radio?”

“Yes. Jagadish Bose was the first person to demonstrate sound over radio waves in 1895 in Kolkata. That invention enables almost all wireless communications we have today. As Americans say, ‘not too shabby.’”

“Touché,” said Max, and bowed his head. “I didn’t say it was my theory, but I heard that somewhere. Maybe there is a half-truth to it. Back to me. After I graduated, I got a job at this game company in Cambridge where I was working on coding artificial intelligence. While there, I got my citizenship, and conceived of some of the concepts that later became the Qube technology. I made some key observations while dealing with the deficiencies in how we did AI. What we did was make ‘pseudo algorithms,’ they just faked behaviors that one might think were intelligent by using state models and expression trees. I remember a magazine article about one of our games that lauded our AI because the enemy would hide behind barriers. But the code just told them to sidestep when they were getting shot at. And that happened to move them behind a barrier, so it was all just a misinterpretation of simple rules. Anyway, when the game company went out of business, I went back to grad school. I focused on inventing the Qube in the cold halls of the MIT Stata Center, and the rest is history. Next.”

“You didn’t tell us anything non-work related,” said Dana.

“Oh yeah. Well, my entire life is kind of work-related. But I like to read, both fiction and non-fiction. I have a huge book collection at home. Although everything I get now is digital, so it’s not growing, at least not physically. Other than that, work and video games.”

Dana went next. “Hi Min, my name is Dana Carter. As Max mentioned, there were two of us at the beginning; I’m the other one. I used to run the American office of Aboriginal Accruals for Graham Neilson. He contributed most of the funding for this project. This project is so important to him that he wanted me to be engaged in its management. He wants me to make sure the core values are never compromised and that the data we get is pure and unbiased. So in other words, I manage the boring administrative part of the project. But I do also get to manage the semi-cool scientific side of it. The researchers here report to me. Max handles the technical staff – those building the hardware, software, and world elements. It’s a good structure and works well.”

Watching her speak, Min estimated she was in her early sixties. She was stocky and had short curly blond hair. The hairstyle probably made her look older than she was.

“I used to be in the U.S. Navy, so I’m very organized and like things structured. But after living in nine different places over eight years, I decided to give civilian life a chance and apply the logistics skills I had acquired. I took some time off to travel the world and happened to meet Graham on a scuba diving expedition. At the time, he was looking for someone who had the ability to navigate the U.S. grants system for him, and we hit it off. I helped set up an office here for his firm and, fast forward a few years, here I am. So yes, as I mentioned, I’m an avid scuba diver, and have had more than a few close encounters with sharks.”

“Hopefully not loan sharks?” asked an Asian man, who’d until now remained silent.

“No, I managed to avoid those so far.” Dana looked at the person to her left, who was the Indian man.

“Hi, Min. My name is Ravi Rashtrakuta Reddy, but people just call me ‘Rash.’ I work as a sociologist here. My job is to study the society of the Polyans. How it developed and organized, and how it’s evolving over time. When I was a child, my father ran a mental health facility, and I used to go there after school to do homework. Observing how people interacted there, admittedly not in a normal sense, fascinated me. It formulated my career interest. After grad school, I stayed on as an assistant professor. But when the program started performing research on lab monkeys, I decided to quit. I was friends with Max from school, and happened to bump into him at a 10k run, and mentioned I was unemployed. He was looking for my exact specialty so it was perfect timing. Having the ability to work with a species uncompromised by any other neighboring cultures is an opportunity that we seldom get, if ever. I jumped at the chance.
 

“Among my accomplishments was creating the Polyan language, which is based on English, so we can understand them. You will see that their names all have a dot in them between two syllables, like in the pronunciation keys in the dictionary. This dot is called an ‘interpunct,’ a symbol that joins things. In math, it's a logical ‘and’ operator. The Polyans use this to connect their given name (prefix) to their leg count (suffix). So there is a consistent suffix for each caste, and they are, starting with three legs: ∙ni, ∙ma, ∙zo, ∙sa, ∙ro.”
 

Rash took a sip from a mug, then added, “I like to run, a lot. It clears my head and lets me focus better afterward. So that is my hobby.” Turning to his colleague, he said, “Jean?”

“Hello. I’m Jean Evens,” said the woman with glasses. “I’m the team’s anthropologist. So Rash’s focus is on how Polyans form into groups. My focus is on how that organization affects them as individuals, how it manifests into a culture.
 
Somehow I fell into a job after high school as a food inspector and used to go around surveying restaurant cleanliness. After a year of that, I couldn’t stand how disgusting things were and wanted to know how our culture allowed for this. This led me to go back to school for anthropology. Otherwise, I have three young kids ages seven, three, and one, so they keep me busy. Unlike most of the staff, I’m never here working into the wee hours of the morning. Anyway, it’s nice meeting you, Min.” She threw Min a motherly smile.