Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

She regarded the two strands of hair that she’d carefully laid across the locking case. “Nice, Alix. You’re a real superspy,” she muttered to herself. It felt silly, but it still felt better to her than doing nothing.

Eventually, though, the research dead-ended. There was all the information that was out there in the public view, and then there was whatever was tucked away inside the Doubt Factory. It was possible to speculate endlessly about what Dad and Uncle George were up to, but without being able to see their client files, that’s all it was: speculation.

No wonder 2.0 had wanted her to help them. They’d run into the same brick wall that she had.

She sighed and shoved her research case back under her bed. “I am so sick of liars.”

So go find some people who aren’t .

Unbidden, a memory of Moses and his crew popped into her head. All of them doing whatever they wanted, skating or programming or feeding rats or talking politics. Looking back on it, it felt amazingly free to her. Just thinking about it banished some of the claustrophobic constriction that she’d been feeling for the last few weeks.

So go find them , a voice in her mind suggested again.

Yeah, right. Like you could. The FBI couldn’t find them. Neither could Williams & Crowe. What makes you think you’re so special?

You were there .

Alix paused, considering. She’d been there. She’d been right there. She’d seen that whole factory. She just hadn’t seen enough of the outside. But she’d been there. She’d been at the rave factory, with it’s giant hamster wheel and many dance cages that had become Williams & Crowe cages, but then there had been the other factory, call it the bat cave, the place where 2.0 laired and lived. She’d lived in their bat cave.

Alix grabbed her keys. Jonah saw her heading out the door.

“Where you headed?”

Alix scowled at him. “Nowhere.”

“Great! I’ll come, too.”

“Are you still spying on me?” she asked him pointedly.

“Spying?” Jonah looked hurt, but Alix didn’t really buy it.

“Screw it,” she said, giving up. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Memory lane.”

The rave factory looked pretty much the way she’d seen it the last time, except that someone had cleaned up all the dead rats and taken down 2.0’s banners.

“So is this some kind of getting-over-trauma assignment or something?” Jonah asked.

Alix was sort of regretting bringing Jonah with her, given how little he could take anything seriously. But she’d decided he was more likely to protect her privacy if he was included than if she shut him out, so now he was wandering around the empty building like a tourist at a freak exhibit.

“Check out the smoke stains!” Jonah called, pointing at the ceiling of the factory, smeared with vibrant soot residue of burning saltpeter and sugar and whatever chemicals 2.0 had used to create the colors.

“Yep,” Alix sighed. “Those are smoke stains.”

“They pretty much snowed you, didn’t they?”

“Pretty much.” Alix went outside to survey the empty warehouse. She’d wanted to believe that the place would tell her something, give her a clue about where she’d been taken next, but the truth was they’d drugged the hell out of her, and then she’d woken up… wherever. In the bat cave.

Lisa had exhaustively debriefed Alix after the kidnapping, dragging out every single detail Alix could recall. What kind of sinks had been in the factory? Old porcelain. Two faucets, with silver rubbing off, showing what might be brass underneath. Four little spokes coming off the water faucet’s handles, old-style. Restoration Hardware, like that. What kind of lockers? Orange. With little vents at the top and bottom. How many lockers? Hundreds. At least a couple of hundred. A big changing room. What kind of windows? How many panes? How high were they from the floor? How high were you from the ground outside? How big was the building? How long did it take you to walk across it?

Again and again and again.

Alix had described it perfectly, and yet no one could find it, and as much as she wanted this factory to lead to that factory, it felt like a dead end.

“Are you seriously trying to find 2.0?” Jonah asked. “Is it because of Dad?”

“He’s not all sweetness and light, you know.”

“So what? Who is?” Jonah asked. His voice sounded so knowing and cynical that it brought Alix up short.

She wanted to have some answer to that, but it sort of mirrored her own sentiments. The more she’d researched the shenanigans of the companies that made their living by manufacturing doubt, the more depressed and hopeless she’d felt.

However cynical you think you are, you’re never cynical enough. That was Moses’s perspective.

Except he hadn’t been cynical. None of the 2.0 crew had been. They’d been cynical about other people. But when it came to themselves, they were practically starry-eyed idealists. They’d actually thought they could change the world.

Alix thought of Cynthia. She’d apparently walked away from a pretty good future to run with 2.0. That was some crazy idealism right there. It was almost comic-book idealism. Fighting the good fight against an overwhelming evil.

She thought of Cynthia’s clothes in those industrial lockers in the bat cave. And all those toothbrushes, lined up at the sinks. She could practically play the theme music in her head, imagining everyone getting up in the morning, brushing their teeth, and heading off to battle.

She laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Jonah asked.

“Idealists.” Alix took a last look around the empty warehouse. “Let’s get out of here.”

“You’re done?”

“Yeah. No one ever lived here. It was silly to come.”

They hadn’t lived here. They hadn’t brushed their teeth here or kept their clothes here. They hadn’t slept here or gotten ready for school here, or woken to the smell of…

Alix stopped short. “Fresh bread.”

Jonah looked at her like she was nuts. Alix was starting to get used to that expression.

Fresh bread. Bread manufacture. Bread baking.

Cynthia said she had been sick of smelling bread because her parents lived near a bakery. She’d made the comment in the lunchroom. The smell was like being smothered in yeast, she’d said. And in the morning, Cynthia had smelled bread when the wind was wrong. She hated bread, and she always wrinkled her nose at the smell.

Bread factories, bread production

As soon as Alix got home, she started doing map searches for bakeries on her computer, but all she came up with were custom cake shops and coffeehouses, which would have been really helpful if she’d wanted a nice chocolate Grenache tart and a sip of espresso.

Bread distribution, bread warehouse

“Is there such a thing as a bread warehouse?” Alix wondered aloud. It didn’t seem to matter. She still wasn’t finding what she wanted.

She gave up on map searches and started doing news searches instead. Looking for stories about bread factories…

“Well, well, well…”

There was an old news story about a Hostess factory going out of business and selling its building to another company, Maple Confections. One of Maple’s big products was Harvest Health Bread. The story was all about how a bunch of baking jobs were going to still stay in the area….

Alix searched Maple Confections . She got a hit in northern New Jersey.