MOAB

Chapter 3i^2

Chapter 3i^2

“Why are you so nervous man? Relax!” said Nikos, sitting next to him in the lobby, with a pose fit for a king.

“Of course I’m nervous, the future of my family depends on this,” said Yanni biting his lip.

“I got your back, man. You’ll talk to a fellow scientist, not a corporate suit who knows nothing about your expertise. It will be like having a frappé with a colleague down at the uni. Sit back, gamoto and relax!”

Yeah, that actually made him unclench his fists a bit. Talking to a fellow scientist would be much preferable than trying to convince some profit-obsessed CEO to divert resources to things he could never hope to grasp. Yanni tried to take his mind off the task by examining his surroundings. The temporary main offices of Hermes Information Technology looked a lot like what you would expect their primary ones to be. Only thing they were missing was their own skyscraper with a huge corporate logo on top. Well, the man sitting next to him like royalty was the one making that happen. Good thing they were friends since before learning to ride a bike.

A dash of paranoia made Yanni think that the secretary was just delaying them before blowing them off to a rescheduled appointment, but Nikos was confident that this was the real deal. He squinted a bit to read the corporate blue overlay with the programs she was using but he was too far to make out anything. In order to calm his mind, he started studying the things that were in his power, just like Thalia did. He checked over the custom gen-two laser specifications he brought, the flash drive with the presentation he completed last night (he had already sent an email beforehand, but he wanted to hold it in his hand as a backup) and the printed renders of the Maxwell equations he was attempting to utilize.

“Dr. Tsafantakis?” said the young secretary. “You may step inside. No, alone please,” raising her palm at Nikos, polite but firm.

Yanni looked back at Nikos who made an assuring gesture at him, the one he always made when Yanni needed encouragement to go talk to a girl. “Who’s the man?”

It was also the exact same gesture that had made Yanni scrounge up enough courage to talk to Thalia for the first time. Yeah, that had worked out nicely. So will this, Yanni convinced himself and walked inside, while murmuring, “I’m the man.”

As soon as the door behind him closed the ambient noise of the corridor vanished. The room he was in could would a Spartan envious. There was only a man sitting in a chair, with a small plain drawer-case next to him. The man didn’t look like the person to oversee a theoretical physics committee. He looked like a… concierge.

“Hello, I am the commissionaire,” the man said with a forced pleasantness.

A doorman, then.

“Please, leave all your belongings with me and step inside the next room. Hermes assures you of the safety of your belongings. They will be placed inside this hermetically sealed container,” the doorman said.

Whatever, it was not theft Yanni was worried about. “Ok, here you go. My phone too, I assume. Here. What? This is my presentation. How am I to present my work withou-”

“Please. It’s company policy. You are free to decline, of course, but that would mean an immediate cancellation of your appointment. Do you want me to inform the front desk?” asked the doorman a bit louder than he really needed to inside this echoing room.

“Ohi. No. It’s ok, fine, take it. I accept. Now what?” Yanni said and emptied even the lint from his pockets.

“Excellent. Please pass though these doors for your appointment,” said the doorman and put his stuff in the drawer-case. The air flooped as it closed.

Huh. The damn thing really was hermetically sealed.

Yanni passed through a small plain corridor and stepped inside another room. There was a woman waiting there for him, dressed with a smart outfit that was equally feminine and serious. He rushed a bit too fast to get near her and shake her hand, she was obviously more suited to deal with his presentation. But she couldn’t have been the one Nikos said was drooling over his proof.

“Hello Doctor, pleased to meet you,” she said with a serious business smile.

He made to reply, the nervousness starting to take over again when a splash of colour in his peripheral vision made him turn his head. In the big empty room with them was a small child, couldn’t have been more than five years old. The child was playing with a toy truck and if Yanni squinted a bit, he could swear that he could see his own Georgie in his place.

“Um. I… Yes. Can we start, do you want me to…” Yanni said, but the smartly-dressed woman touched him on the shoulder and interrupted him.

“Dr. Tsafantakis, I will not be the one to see your presentation. The Ellipsis project needs to remain minimal in all of its aspects and all of its phases. Even early ones such as this one. You do not need a board to explain your apodeixis to, just as you do not need the renders nor the slideshow presentation you so thoughtfully sent ahead,” she said with authority and a glimmer of pride.

“Ok. Then what do I need to do?” asked Yanni.

“You need to explain your hypothesis to this child. Should the child understand, then you will be granted all you need to make it happen. Everything will be explained to you in the next phase, but you must focus on this one for now,” she said with the same tone in her voice.

“You are kidding. You are kidding me about presenting my life’s work to a kid,” said Yanni matter-of-factly.

The smartly-dressed woman tightened her dossier on her chest and leaned forward to make her point. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Then she added with a factual tone, “Albert Einstein.”

Yanni dashed a bit back and forth and then chose his words carefully. “You want me to explain a theoretical application of Maxwell’s light bending equations to quantum computing, to a five-year old boy?”

She replied, “Yes.” The period was audible.

“Very well, then!” said Yanni, succumbing to the madness around him.

The smartly-dressed woman left the room. Yanni looked around for a chair but there was none. The floor it was, then. He squatted next to the child. His fatherly instincts kicked in and he started thinking about this whole deal, as he established rapport with the child. That poor kid could be scared. What if he wasn’t a father, would they still let him alone in here, a stranger alone with a kid? Was the mother nearby, watching? The corporation was certainly watching him, there were cameras in the room. What sort of people do such a thing?

“Hey, my son has a truck exactly like that! His name is George, but we call him Georgie. What is your name?”

“Alex.”

“Well, Alex, we can get you two to play with your trucks together. Georgie carries around flour with his truck. But it spills everywhere and his mommy gets mad at him sometimes for making a mess.”

“Mine doesn’t. But she never gets mad at anything. But. But I don’t have flour to carry around, so I don’t really know.”

Thank god, the kid is clever. Yanni thought about what Alex said. “Does your mommy teach you stuff? I know it’s still early for you to go to school, but does she teach you mathematics? Adding apples in the cart?”

“Yes! I know that one plus one equals two!” Alex said triumphantly.

Skata. Yanni could work with that foundation, but he was pretty sure he didn’t have a decade available to impart some formal education.

“What does mommy teach you?”

“Not much, she has to take care of my brothers and sisters as well. She doesn’t have time for all of us. But she reads us fairytales and has us draw the pictures in our heads.”

“Does mommy work?”

“Her work is being our mommy. She is good at it.”

Oh man. Was this one of the orphans he had heard about on the news? The ones adopted by corporations?

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

Alex raised his shoulders. “The whole room.”

Yanni had a chilling thought at that point.

“Alex. What do the other grown-ups call your mommy?”

Alex looked up from his toy with his joyous little eyes and answered, “Muse.”