Neal Stephenson - Reamde

A straight shot down a paved state highway took them to the gate of the Possum Walk Trailer Park, which had been beefed up and connected to an electronic security system. Childish as the emotion was, Richard could not help but feel resentful over being interrogated by an electronic box thrust out on a pipe. He had come to this place several years ago when it had still reeked of exploded meth factories and hog confinement facilities. In those days, Devin had been a mere tenant, living alone in a thirty-year-old mobile home that gave and groaned beneath his weight whenever he troubled himself to get up and move around. Of course, he had long since bought the entire property, as well as a ­couple of adjoining lots, and evicted his erstwhile neighbors and sold their trailers on eBay. His original trailer stood alone, a weird hybrid of Little House on the Prairie and Grapes of Wrath . A prefab steel roof had been erected above it to protect it from vengeful elements. Farther back from the highway, concrete pads had been poured and steel buildings erected to form a U-shaped compound embracing the small, separate building, little different from a mobile home in size and layout, where Devin worked and lived. The purpose of the U was to house his lawyers, accountants, managers, and sous-novelists.

The gate droned aside. As Richard drove through it, the GPS unit announced: “You have arrived!” Idling past the old mobile home, Richard gazed at its front door for a few moments and let himself be that guy from several years ago who had come up those rotten wooden steps to knock on that door and offer Devin a job. Then he snapped out of it and turned his attention to a woman just emerging from the closest prong of the U. She was struggling with her weight, and was dressed and coiffed in a way that, seen on the streets of Seattle, would have been incontrovertible proof of Sapphism. But Richard knew he had to be careful about making such assumptions here. As he parked in one of about seven thousand available spaces, she drifted over toward the driver’s side of the car and began simpering at him through the window. Richard prepared himself to receive disagreeable news manfully.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Forthrast, I’m Wendy.”

“Nice to meet you, Wendy.” Until a ­couple of years ago, he’d have gone through the ritual of insisting that she address him as Richard, but the fact was that he had flown here from Seattle in a private jet and she had driven her Subaru.

“He just went into F. S. about fifteen minutes ago,” she said apologetically. “Would you like to come in and make yourself comfortable?”

The first of these sentences meant that, according to the biometric sensors on Devin’s body, he had just entered into what psychologists referred to as the flow state, and he was not to be disturbed until he emerged from it of his own volition.

The second of these sentences meant sitting around and eating. As Richard knew all too well, there was a waiting room stocked with bowls of Chex Party Mix and recombinant gorp, with fridges along the walls replete with soft drinks, and a coffee urn. Sitting in that room, using the free Wi-Fi, was an inevitable prelude to any meeting with Devin, who had an uncanny knack for ascending into the flow state only minutes before any scheduled visit. As a way to head off tiresome, repetitive objections from visitors who could not be placated with gorp and sugar water, Devin’s staff had printed up copies of a complimentary handout sheet, “Flow State FAQ,” and scattered them around the feeding troughs. Pluto, who had never been here before, picked one of them up and went into the flow state himself as he learned all about this amazingly productive psychological/physiological regimen and how all history’s greatest artists and geniuses had done their best work while immersed in it. Richard, who’d had plenty of opportunities to familiarize himself with the document’s contents, knew that it contained only one operative phrase, which was that interruptions were inimical to the flow state and had to be prevented at all costs. It was the most passive-aggressive way imaginable for Devin Skraelin to tell people that he was in the middle of something and fuck off.

Having already committed an unpardonable sin against his body by eating the Rice Krispie Treat at the airport, Richard forced himself to ignore the proffered food. He opened his laptop and checked his email.

• As far as T’Rain was concerned, he saw nothing that couldn’t wait. Everyone who mattered at Corporation 9592 knew that he was doing this and so they weren’t bothering him.

• There was a little uptick of traffic on his Schloss Hundschüttler email address. The weather had turned warm during the last few days, as they’d expected, and the skiing, which had been marginal during Peter and Zula’s visit, had gone decisively to hell. The long-range forecast looked worse. So Chet had declared that Mud Month would commence in two days. This was a mandatory four-week break in the Schloss’s operations, when all the employees got to go home, and the place sat empty.

• Brother John had posted an update on Dad’s latest round of visits to medical specialists. Nothing huge to report on that front.

Richard closed his laptop. He reached over and took one of the free “Flow State FAQ” handouts and flipped it over so that he was looking at its back side, which was blank. He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a Sharpie and used it to write

DEVIN

FUCKING KNOCK IT OFF

on the back of the FAQ. Then he got up and walked out of the waiting area and back across the parking area, passing the old trailer again, all the way to the entrance gate. He slapped an override button that caused the gate to pull open, then went outside and positioned himself in front of the video camera that monitored incoming cars. He held up the sheet of paper in view of the video camera and stood there while he counted to twenty. Then he walked back through the gate and returned to his position in the waiting area.

Five minutes later, Wendy came in and announced that Devin had emerged from the flow state earlier than was his wont and that they were welcome to go in and see him.

“I know the way,” Richard said.

THE SPACE WAS windowless. Or, if you were willing to consider giant flat-panel screens as being windows into other worlds, it was a greenhouse. In the middle was Devin’s elliptical trainer, or rather one of a pool of treadmills, elliptical trainers, and other such gadgets that were swapped in and out as he ruined or got sick of them. Depending from the ceiling was a massive articulated structure: an industrial robot arm, capable of being programmed to move along and rotate around a myriad of axes with the silence of a panther and the precision of a knife fighter. It supported an additional large flat-panel screen and a framework that held up an array of input devices: an ergonomic keyboard, trackballs, and other devices of which Richard knew not the names. Devin, naked except for a pair of gym shorts emblazoned with the logo of one of his favorite charities, was stirring the air with his legs, working the reciprocating paddles of the trainer. Invisible streams of cool wind impinged on his body from perfectly silent high-tech fans, not quite evaporating a sheen of perspiration that caused all his veins and tendons, and his twelve-pack abs, to pop out through his skin, as though the epidermis were shrink wrap laid directly over nerve and bone. According to this morning’s stats, Devin’s body fat percentage was an astonishing 4.5, which placed him into a serious calorie debt situation that in theory should extend his life span beyond 110 years. The slight up-and-down bobbing of his head and upper body was compensated for by equal movements of the robot arm, which used a machine vision control loop to track his attitude through a camera and to calculate the vector of translations and rotations needed to keep the huge screen exactly 22.5 inches away from his laser-sculpted corneas and the keyboard and other input devices within easy and comfortable reach of his fingers. A custom-made headset, with flip-down 3D lenses (currently flipped up and out of the way) and a microphone enabled him to dictate ideas or take phone calls as necessary. A chest harness tracked his pulse and sent immediate notification of any flipped T-waves to an on-call cardiologist sitting in an office suite two miles down the road. A defibrillator hung on the wall, blinking green.