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trick.”
    “On top of that they’ve got the glass doubling as solar panels, providing a marginally positive carbon footprint. For the administrative sections of the building at least. Some parts of the labs chew power like a motherfucker.”
    Paul marched left toward the façade of one of the campus’s original brick buildings, now contained within the expensive geometric umbrella of the Quantum Physics Building’s dome.
    “The architect spends every alternate month under a Shinto vow of non-communication in a compound outside Hokkaido. It made negotiations and milestones a total bitch. Dunno why they gave him that prize; it’ll only encourage him.” Paul glanced back the way they came. “Follow me, I’ll take you upstairs.”
    Jack glanced back. “Are we allowed in here?” No sign of the guard, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting for backup. “You’re not acting like we’re allowed to be here. Buildings this expensive usually have doors that work the first time.”
    “Whose face is on that screen?”
    “I don’t know, but he’s smiling like there’s a gun to his head.”
    A hazard-striped security door opened onto a freight elevator, which was set into the façade of the old building. Paul waved his card through a scanner. “You’ve seen a lot of weirdness, yeah?” Paul wasn’t shooting the shit: he was double-checking.
    A fifteen-inch screen on the elevator’s opposite wall flashed to life and provided a rundown of Paul’s appointments: none. It advised that he was five hours early for work and that Monarch Innovations does not approve of more than 10 percent employee overtime in a given month. An MIT-sourced graph appeared to support this philosophy, and the screen wished him a good morning.
    “I have now,” Jack said.
    Paul swiped the card again, tapped the top floor. Jack noticed the tension in his face.
    “Hit me with the weirdest,” Paul said.
    “So I was in Belize. That’s in South America.”
    “I know where Belize is, Jack.”
    “So I was in Belize and made friends with two lady pimps when I helped them save a horse from being beaten to death by some scumbag who owned a racetrack.”
    “That’s—”
    “The next morning I officiated when they fought an early-morning duel over the beautiful prostitute they had both fallen in love with.”
    Paul eyeballed him.
    “2011. Straight-up code duello . ”
    Paul considered. “How did it end?”
    “Marriage. All three of them, quite happily.”
    “Huh.”
    “Life’s short. So, does that qualify?”
    “Not even close. This is our floor.”
    The doors shushed open onto a long, dark corridor. A single door was rim-lit at the end.
    “This doesn’t feel like it fits inside that old building.”
    “We added a couple of reinforced top floors to suit our needs. We’re above the canopy at this level.” Recess lighting kicked in at ankle height, following them toward the door. “Once we get inside I’ll need your help to set a few things up. How familiar are you with the theory of relativity?”
    “I’m relatively familiar.”
    “You still like sci-fi?”
    “We prefer ‘speculative fiction.’”
    “Well, I’d say you’re about to step into it.” Clinically white armored doors rumbled open at the final swipe. “Except this is anything but speculative.” Paul walked into darkness. Jack followed.
    Lights clicked and thudded, revealing the chamber section by section.
    Vertigo kicked in, Jack’s hands closing on the cold steel of the safety rail before him. He was looking down into an octagonal tech pit, NASA-white and hairy with red and blue cables snaking out of discrete access panels. Suspended at the center of the hollowed-out geometric sphere of a room was … another geometric sphere. Held atop a high-tech dais, the sphere was made of a dense-looking dull metal, each face of it jacked and wired with tons of heavy-gauge cabling. The cabling poured from the sphere and down into subfloor cavities, or was draped over