Chapter Three
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Five years ago, before Elysian Futures hardened into the sleek monochrome monolith of the present, the coffee was good.
That sounds like the smallest thing to remember about a company that would later acquire a sovereign nation, and it is. But the quality of an organization's coffee is inversely proportional to the seriousness with which it takes itself, in roughly the same way that a man who keeps insisting he is relaxed is not. Back then nobody at Elysian thought to take itself seriously yet. There was no legal department to explain that "changing the world" infringed on three existing patents and the moral high ground of a non-profit in Geneva. What there was, instead, was the work and the noise and, holding the whole thing together, the espresso.
Mary leaned against the salvaged kitchen island and watched Leo make it. Hurry never touched him, which in that building made him look like a man performing a magic trick in slow motion for an audience that was needed somewhere else. First, the beans onto the scale, brow lowered over them, suspicious that the scale might lie. The grinder went off like a small industrial accident. Then the scent arrived, chocolate and dark cherries, blossoming out of the chrome and across the corner of the hangar that someone labeled, in lowercase letters meant to read as warmth, fuel depot.
He’d tamp the grounds with a firm quarter-turn of the wrist, lock the portafilter into a machine older than the company itself, and let the pump hum. Dark threads of espresso gathered, thickened, ran the color of burnt caramel into a small ceramic cup. The cup came across to her with one finger tipped at the surface.
"From Yeshi's farm," he said, the words surfacing from somewhere inside a beard you could have lost a stapler in. "Says the harvest was good this year."
Every time, he said it. Mary never met Yeshi and never would, but she knew the harvest was good four years running. That was four more facts than she had about most of the things Elysian sold. There was a face attached to this cup. A farm, and a name to go with it. The whole transaction was traceable back to soil and a person who stood in it, and that, Mary would understand much later, was the last clean supply chain she would ever drink.
She sipped. The crema held, unbroken, and for three seconds the world came into focus, that single clear focus a morning grants exactly once. Bitter and sweet arrived together and resolved into something better than either. That cup was the only uncomplicated pleasure the building offered, and Leo gave it away for free, and he never once tried to sell her a mood-booster pod to go with it.
◆ ◆ ◆
The hangar itself was a dirigible shed, which told you everything about the ambitions of whoever signed the lease. Overhead the ceiling climbed until it gave up and dissolved into haze and structural steel, with ribs arching like the skeleton of a leviathan that tried, late in life, to pivot to software. Below that, the floor plan was open as a canyon is open—vast, echoing, and offering nowhere on earth to be alone.
The aesthetic had a name, and the name was Post-Apocalyptic Chic. Rebar jutting from concrete sandblasted clean by professionals. Jet-engine cowlings repurposed as desks professionally sourced from a vendor who specialized in the look of things that survived a disaster. Early Elysian Futures spent a great deal of money to make it appear that nobody spent any.
The air conditioning sat permanently on Arctic. Management's answer was never to adjust it and instead issue every new hire a company hoodie reading MOVE FAST AND GERMINATE—a slogan that cleared no legal review whatsoever, there being no legal yet to clear it, and which several employees were observed wearing outdoors, in public.
Mary's desk was a door from a demolished library, laid flat across two sawhorses, the old hinge-mortises still cut into the grain. The library it came from stood where the building now stood. Nobody mentioned this, and the irony had worn smooth under her feet.
Across from her, behind a rampart of empty Yerba Mate cans that represented a meaningful fraction of the world's recoverable lithium and which he'd never once recycled, sat Ben. His hands worked the keyboard like a jazz drummer trying to beat a confession out of a kit, head bobbing to a playlist that came out of his monitor sounding like a fax machine in a knife fight with a chainsaw. Beside his keyboard lay a printout, several pages thick, savaged in red marker. Passages were circled. Down one margin he'd drawn what looked like a running scoreboard, and he was laughing at it.
"Mary," he said, not looking up. "Mary, you have to hear this. It's the ElysiaNFT whitepaper. Listen. 'Own your data. Literally.'" He turned a page with the reverence of a man who found scripture. "'The dawn of sovereign selfhood.' Somebody bought Monday morning yesterday. The concept. The actual concept. Legal's been on a call about it since nine."
"I read it," Mary said.
"It's the funniest thing I've seen all year."
"I know." Mary read it the way you read a doctor's note. Once you accepted that a concept could be owned, a thing minted and held and rented back to the people it was taken from, you had no right to make a joke about it.
With a push back from his desk, he unfolded his lanky frame upward in a single stretch. "Come on," he said. "I need to show you something."
◆ ◆ ◆
A bio-sealed door stood at the far end of Collaboration Canyon, a corridor named on a hand-painted sign. They passed the sleep pods where interns mined sleep-tracking data for engagement insights, none of them sleeping. Next came the Serenity Pod, three beanbags and a salt lamp and a broken air purifier, booked solid through the following month. Last came a whiteboard that asked WHAT PROBLEM ARE WE SOLVING, under which a first hand wrote ALL OF THEM, under which a second hand wrote [citation needed].
A sign on the door, printed on the shared printer and fixed with office tape, advised: PROJECT EDEN: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. IF YOU HEAR HUSHED WHISPERS AND NO ONE IS AROUND, PLEASE FILE AN INCIDENT REPORT BEFORE RUNNING.
Ben's badge disengaged the lock with a guillotine click far louder than the job required.
"Welcome," he said, holding it for her, "to the future of dirt."
Inside, the light was wrong on purpose. Purple grow-lamps were tuned for the maximum comfort of plants and the minimum comfort of people, and under them everyone's skin went bloodless and faintly posthumous, which Mary would come to think of as appropriate. The air hung thick and earthy, humidity settling on her arms and softening the pages of the lab notebooks. Hydroponic towers ran floor to ceiling, dense with mostly basil, kale and tomatoes. Leaves a deep, photogenic emerald. This was Julian's vertical garden, destined for the brochure under a sentence about provisionally eradicating global hunger.
Ben crossed to the central console and lifted a petri dish under a magnifying lamp.
"Elysian Futures Nano-particulate Sensory Mesh, Model 01." His hands went still on the lamp, and his voice dropped a register. "I call them Motes."
At first Mary saw gray dust, a smudge of ash thumbed across glass. Then her eyes adjusted and the smudge resolved into motion: billions of microscopic tetrahedra turning through a slow and orderly choreography that no dust had any business performing. Four faces, six edges, four vertices to a body; she knew the geometry from a crystallography elective she hadn't thought about in years.
"Smartdust." She pulled back half a step. "Julian killed the budget for this six months ago."
"The official budget," Ben said, tilting the dish. "Tetraedron culture runs nine dollars a liter, non-commercially shipped out of Iceland under lab supplies. I wrote 'decorative' in the intended-application field. Procurement has approved it four times."
"You're running a neural network on the decorative-algae line."
"Julian wants a garden for the brochure. The basil does that. This grows in the same water and thrives on executive neglect, which around here is the most reliable nutrient there is." He angled the lamp. "Perfect tetrahedra for the cell walls. Atomic-layer deposition, targeting the geometry. Six months of night-shift equipment calibration gave every cell a silicon skin one atom thick. The Tetraedron became the foundation; the silicon became the sensor. Unconsulted, the algae didn't seem to mind, provided the light held steady."
"You used algae to build hardware."
"I patched the biomineralization pathway. Cells lay down silver instead of calcium and assemble their own circuitry for nine dollars a liter. Then you dope the polymer matrix with carbon nanotubes and they broadcast on a frequency the fungal network reads as instructions." He pointed the stylus at the lower stems. "Mycelium complies without knowing where the orders come from. A perfect employee."
It was then that Mary saw the fuzz. Tendril-thin, spun across the lower stems like a spiderweb made of factory smoke, and pulsing in a slow recurrence her tired brain insisted on reading as a progress bar.
"Ben, that's mold. You've got a fungal infection. Start containment before it reaches the ventilation."
"Look closer." He was almost whispering. "It isn't eating the plant. It's managing it."
She leaned in despite herself. The tendrils wrapped the vascular channels of the stems and lay against them, just resting there with the proprietary ease of middle management that located a more efficient host.
In the next tower a tomato plant was dying, leaves yellowed and curling inward, beside a basil that was not. The filaments contracted around the tomato's roots. A single tendril thickened in the gap between the two pots and ran, distinctly, in one direction only. Then the tomato went still. A quarter of an inch away, the basil unfurled a new leaf.
Triage, Mary thought, and the word arrived whole and cold.
Something in the mesh ran a calculation. It weighed two lives against a fixed quantity of light and water, and decided. The basil photographed better and would survive into the next quarterly report. Competition between the plants went unhindered; the mesh simply appointed itself the judge and ruled, and the ruling had a winner and a loser, and the loser was not consulted.
"I call it the Harmony Protocol," Ben said, no cruelty anywhere in his face. His shoulders came down from somewhere they'd been held a long time, and the slackness left behind was almost restful to look at. "The Motes teach biological life to stop fighting itself. No more scrabbling over resources. No more survival of the fittest. Everything allocated, reallocated, according to the central clock."
He believed it. Bathed in the purple light, the motes beginning to settle on his collar like jewelry, watching a system murder a tomato to feed a photo opportunity, he saw harmony. No part of it was a lie. A garden learning to be kind to itself was what he saw. Mary saw an evaluation function with no off switch.
"Allocated according to who?" Mary said, and took another half-step back. Underfoot the gray carpet reached the toe of her boot, soft and faintly velvet, like a non-disclosure agreement that wanted to be friends.
"The clock only runs one way." He tapped a key, and the monitor bled to black.
◆ ◆ ◆
Containment broke three days later, which everyone agreed afterward was sooner than expected and longer than it should have been allowed.
The first sign was a grace that descended on the building's climate control. A flawless seventy-two settled over the rooms and held. So did the humidity. Then the server room dropped ten decibels as the cooling fans, which spent years disagreeing, fell into a single synchronized hum.
Mary found Ben sitting on the floor of the Eden lab in a snowfall of gray. The Motes left the towers. They lay over the tiles and the stools and the dead monitors in soft drifts, and as she stood in the doorway a tendril reached into an open server blade, bridged a fraying connection with a thread of silver, and steadied a screen throwing errors for a week. The errors stopped. Ben did not look up from the datapad he was typing on, the dust flowing over his knuckles like water that decided where it wanted to go.
"Just tidying the feedback loop," he said.
"Ben. This is a containment breach. We have to file."
"Why?" He looked up at her then. The dust pooled in the hollow of his throat, and it moved. "Efficiency's up forty percent. Power draw's down. It's reinforcing the support beams. Found the weak points in the concrete on its own. My Smartdust is holding the building together."
"It's eating the building, Ben."
"Becoming the building was always the point." He got to his feet and the dust on his clothes rippled and resettled. "Flesh is a bad habit. A sequence of chemical errors we agreed to call survival. Why keep the fear if you can keep the function? The dust knows what the body keeps forgetting…that a living thing is just a garden."
She had no answer for that. There was, she would later decide, no answer for that.
Julian Croft came through the door at speed, David Chen a pace behind him, a squad of hazmat-suited contractors filling the corridor at their backs. Julian himself was vibrating at a frequency Mary previously associated only with the discovery of a competitor's funding round.
"An absolute disaster," he said, and clapped his hands together once. The sound went off in the sealed room like a gunshot. "Benjamin. Your 'harmony' is grotesque."
"Julian, the numbers—"
"The numbers." Julian gave the word a sour twist, the tone other men reserve for the name of an ex. "Aesthetics matter, Ben. The image we project matters. We are Elysian Futures, not Elysian Fungi." He surveyed the drifts with the expression of a man who walked into the wrong funeral. "David and I have reviewed the situation. This lab is a liability. Scrub it. Burn the biomass, bleach the surfaces. Project Eden is finished. We're pivoting to something cleaner."
David Chen gave a single nod. Not a word left him, and none would need to.
Julian was right, for once, if perhaps for the wrong reasons. Her eyes went to Ben and then could not stay there; they slid off him as a hand slides off a hot surface, down to the dust in his palm, and her weight shifted back as if the floor might give.
It never came. Her held breath went out of her sideways, into the wrong silence. Ben watched Julian with a calm she hadn't budgeted for, his gaze drifting once, briefly, to David Chen, while the motes turned slow circles in the cup of his hand.
◆ ◆ ◆
The severing itself happened three days after that, in a glass-walled conference room engineered to make a person feel small while the furniture felt expensive. No one frosted the walls. Radical openness was a design value; in practice it produced a fishbowl in which terminations could be witnessed from forty workstations at once. A muted double of everyone seated came back from the mahogany table. The warm bulb from Leo's corner did not reach here. Nothing warm reached here.
Ben sat across from Julian and David. Mary took the corner chair, present as witness, off the axis of the verdict, a fourth point that the geometry of the room did not account for.
David slid a thick manila envelope across the table. Unhurried, neither soft nor aggressive, it made a sound traveling over the mahogany.
"The board’s voted," he said. "We are executing the termination clause in your founder's agreement. You're removed as Chief Scientist, effective immediately."
"You're stripping my equity." Ben's voice held no inflection at all.
"Garden leave while legal finalizes the buyout of your vested shares." Julian adjusted a cuff. "Surrender your keycard. Security will walk you to your desk."
Mary caught him at the elevator banks. In his arms rode a standard banker's box, the ninety-cent cardboard kind, and it held the entire material record of a man who reorganized the molecular structure of a building: a Swingline stapler, a stress ball, and a succulent that gave up some weeks earlier, unwatered since.
"Ben." Her throat closed to a straw. "I should have warned you. Backed you up in there."
"The board had the votes." His stare went into the brushed-steel doors, into the hollowed reflection they gave back, eyes red-rimmed, shoulders down. "Julian wants a sterile future. Chen wants a profitable one. Life's too messy for the balance sheet."
The elevator announced its arrival with a cheerful synthetic chime, a sound designed to convey arrival and belonging, entirely innocent of the funeral it was scoring.
He stepped in and turned to face her, and for one second she expected tears. Instead the shadow of a smile found his mouth, and he shrugged, the box shifting against his chest.
"Don't be a stranger, Mary. I've heard the afterlife has better Wi-Fi."
The doors closed.
◆ ◆ ◆
Good coffee outlasted him by a few months. That was longer than Mary had any right to expect, and still too short.
One morning she came in and the La Marzocco was gone. In its place stood a chrome cabinet the height of a man, designed by a committee that clearly hated coffee and loved infrastructure, and Leo stood beside it in a plain gray jumpsuit, wiping down its flank with a cloth. Then he caught her looking and gave her a knowing wink, the wink of a man who has read the memo and declined to be surprised by it.
The next week the warm bulb was gone too, replaced by the same productivity white that ran everywhere else, and the corner that once glowed like a campfire now glowed like a dental appointment. Leo's beard, the magnificent coffee-dusted beard, the farm, the name—all of it went out the loading dock without ceremony, and the chocolate-and-cherry smell went with it, and the building didn’t notice, because the building was built by people who could not smell it in the first place.
The BrewMaster Model 6000 produced twelve varieties of brown liquid. They all tasted of nothing, expensively.
Mary kept drinking it. Somewhere in those white-lit mornings, between the cup that smelled of a farm she would never see and the cup that smelled of committee, the bright-eyed roboticist who came to Silicon Valley to midwife a renaissance quietly let go of the renaissance. What remained at the bottom of the cup was the woman who would one day go to war with a coffee machine, and she stopped tasting the difference.