Read Set This House in Order for Free Online Page B

“Yeah, the guy I talked to at the Warehouse mentioned something about a drug problem.” She raised an eyebrow. “Adam again?”
    â€œNot exactly…It’s kind of a long story.”
    â€œAnother ‘complicated truth’?” Julie grinned. “What kind of work are you looking for?”
    I shrugged. “Anything, really. As long as it’s something I can learn on the job.”
    â€œAny objections to working with computers again?”
    â€œNo…except that I still don’t know that much about them. Why?”
    â€œJust a thought,” Julie said. “My lease starts today—my commercial lease, the one for the business I’m starting?—and I was actually just on my way down to check the place out. I could use an extra pair of hands while I’m setting things up…and who knows, there might even be a long-term position in it for you.”
    â€œI don’t see how,” I said. “I mean, I’ll be happy to help you get your office set up, but I honestly don’t know anything about virtual reality.”
    â€œOh, but you do, though. You know more about it than anyone I’ve ever met.”
    â€œI don’t know anything about it!” I protested. “I don’t even know what it is. You never told me.”
    â€œPut it this way: it’s a lot like what you’ve got in your head.”
    â€œYou mean it’s like the house? But that can’t be right. The house isn’t real.”
    â€œWell, neither is virtual reality.”
    â€œI don’t understand.”
    â€œThat’s OK,” Julie said, smiling at my confusion. “You’ll learn.” And then she surprised me again, by linking her arm in mine as if we were old friends and the incident in the bar had never happened. “Walk with me. I’ll explain my master plan along the way.”

3
    There are actually two bridges on Bridge Street. The west bridge, which passes over the creek that gives Autumn Creek its name, is the main route out of town. The east bridge is used mostly by timber trucks. It spans a gully called Thaw Canal, a springtime tributary of Autumn Creek. Beyond the canal, East Bridge Street is only paved for the first quarter mile, after which it turns into a gravel-top service road.
    On the morning I met Penny Driver, I hiked to work across the canal bridge, following the same path I’d first taken with Julie Sivik two years before. The Reality Factory was located on a half-acre lot alongside East Bridge Street’s last stretch of asphalt. My father thought the lot had originally been a truck depot—there was an old fuel island with rusted-out diesel pumps at one end of the property—but for several years before Julie took out her lease it had been a storage facility. The main building, the one that became the Factory, was a long, concrete-walled shed. Shed anyway is what Julie called it, although it was huge, as big as Bit Warehouse inside, with nothing but a double row of support columns to break up the space.
    I got to the Factory a little after eight. Julie had arrived ahead of me; her car was parked on the lot, under an awning by the diesel pumps. It was the same ’57 Cadillac sedan she’d been driving two years ago, still in the process of being fixed up. You might be thinking she can’t have worked very hard at repairing it, but in fact she had, at least off and on—but for every problem she fixed, another seemed to develop, so that the overall condition of the car never really improved. Julie still insisted she was going to sell it one day, though she no longer talked about making a profit.
    I went around to the side door of the Factory and let myself in. Inside, Julie’s voice echoed from the shed’s rafters—she was back in the maze of army tents somewhere, having an argument with one of the Manciplebrothers. Probably Irwin, the soft-spoken younger Manciple; only