Fade to Blink - A Quantum Date Ch. 02

1st Week June 32 Tuesday

"Well you look refreshed." Marybeth dropped a donut off at my desk. "There's more in the kitchen. Major push went well last night. Quality team." And she twirled away.

I looked at the fried dough for a moment, looked at my coffee, back to the donut and then to my code. I couldn't ignore the donut. Was it really from the Quality team?

I felt refreshed. I suppose that's what ten hours of sleep will do. I only thought about Jimmie every ten minutes. Him videoing me peeing. Pulse. Restraining me. Pulse. Face fucking me. Demeaning me. Pulse.

The taste of the donut spun me back to the meeting with Hodgson a few weeks before.

Mid-May 32

Calendar Invite, Security Review, May 12, 2023, HQ03.14.30, MiltHodgson, Director CorpSec

The calendar hit greeted me when I got into work, coffee in hand, popping off the screen like the eyes from a bad mid-20th century cartoon character. It didn't matter that there was the usual glob of emails and invites coming from the off-shore folks; somehow my brain saw that one.

My back stiffened against the chair. I didn't even need to open the thing. What could it possibly say that wasn't trouble? It was from Hodgson. It was trouble. Welp. That only took a month. I figured it had to do with Jimmie, our conversations, the blueprint in the cabinet. What else could it be? Panicked, my thoughts whipped back to that night after the club; the night he'd gotten me mixed up in all of this.

Mid-April 32

By the time we'd gotten from the parking lot to his apartment, the orange blob had settled somewhere around my stomach, sloshing against my ribs. My nipples were hard, rubbing against my bra, the sensation dripping into the orange pool, my fingers tingling at the memory of his penis, imagining feeling it naked, wrapping my hand around it and squeezing. The trip up was a blur, stairways, doors, hallways, his hand gripping mine.

He let me into his apartment, closing the door behind us before grabbing my shoulders, turning me around and pressing his lips against me. I slipped my hand down to feel the thickening below his belt, pushing my tongue into his mouth, dropping my purse on the floor. He turned my back to the wall and held me there, grinding his pelvis against my hand until I finally pushed him away, coming up for air, the orange blob breaking out of my gut, my breasts lit up. I wanted this so bad, I needed it, and it was going to happen, but more important, far more important than getting slick between the sheets with this guy was knowing why he'd been so cagey about bringing me here. Please don't let him be a whack-job!

"Fuck, Jimmie!" I looked at his eyes filled with mischief and need. "Slow down a little." I pushed him further away and slipped into his living room, stooping to pick up my bag. Catching my breath, feeling the blob settle slightly, I sat on the couch and looked up at him. "What...did you have to show me..." I waved my hand, getting my breath under control, "other than that." My eyes darting below his waist, my lips pressed into a thin smile.

His face changed, stiffening, his own smile fading. He glanced at a piece of furniture and then back to me. I followed his eyes: Cabinet. Window. Face. Worried. Cabinet. Hands. Face. Bulge. He took a seat. My attention stayed with the bulge and then moved to his face. He leaned in and I was about to push him away, but he shook his head, and he whispered, "This is super serious, Anne. Super serious."

I tensed, not at all understanding the change in his mood. The sloshing had stopped, yellow fading to orange, fading to grey. Goosebumps raised on my breasts, my nipples softening. Oh god, oh god, oh god, he's a psycho. I'm all alone with him. I breathed out carefully, reminding myself that Marybeth knew where I was, my heartrate jumping. All my defaults for trust were one thing, but even I have my limits.

"Hey," he continued so softly I could barely hear. "Can you turn off your screen for a sec?" He reached into his pocket and did the same, quietly getting up and unplugging his router hanging on the wall.

I focused on reducing my panic, processing the whipsaw of my arousal with his abrupt shift into paranoia.

Grabbing a walkie-talkie from a bookshelf, he walked around the room, glancing up and back until he'd made the entire circuit. Then, holding a finger up to me, he left through an archway into the dining area off to my left and, I supposed, to a kitchen behind a wall that framed his living room. Returning, he slipped into a hallway behind me on the opposite side of the room and a few moments later came back. "Okay. It's good." Still quiet but at least close to a normal volume. Putting down the device, he pulled out a small speaker from a space near his feet and turned it to face the sliding glass doors directly in front of us. He flipped a switch and finally joined me on the couch.

"What the fuck, Jimmie?" I could hear a faint humming from the speaker. The syrupy blob had evaporated to a smoggy cloud, the slipperiness between my thighs had turned clammy.

"I know. It must look like I'm a fucking wing nut. But MEI is pretty serious about this shit."

He stared at me, waiting for something, fuck if I knew what. "Okay, so. I'm here. You need something else or...?" I looked over at the cabinet, my heartbeat skittish but settling.

He shook his head and blew out some air. "Shit. Okay. Yeah." Crossing over to the cabinet he knelt down, opened a door and fiddled with something before pulling out a long tube. I couldn't see how it could have fit in there. It didn't seem possible. "Okay. Check it out." He knelt in front of me, unrolling the thing on the carpet, pulling off one shoe to hold one corner and then the other. "You know what this is?"

How could I know what the fuck it was? "Really?" I looked at it. It was a blueprint, but beyond that I couldn't tell anything. "It's a blueprint?"

He smiled and nodded, reaching for my shoes to hold down the other corners. "Yeah. It's a blueprint. From MEI." He pointed to the title running along the short end, MEI's logo. "Kinda weird, isn't it?"

I shook my head. "Why?" TauPsi Commutator Bearing. What the fuck is that?

"Paper. Blueprint? You ever seen one?" He looked up at me.

I shook my head. "I guess not. But...what is it?"

He wiped his face. "This is one of the supposed applications." He pointed his finger to a circular figure in the center of the page.

It looked like a gear. I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. "Ummm...it looks like a steampunk movie poster."

He paused, followed by a quick laugh. "Yeah! Funny you should say that. It was one of the inspirations for the company."

I shook my head again, my eyes shifting between the paper and his face, gear, bulge, shirt buttons, face, smile, eyes, bulge, finger, gear. "I don't understand."

"Montrose 'Monty' Green, right?" He looked at me, but we'd already covered this ground. "He's the money-man, but Richard 'Ritchie' Gibson...ummm...Sir Richard Gibson is the idea-man. He published an article about 15 years ago on the subject of 'Steampunk quantum machines' that basically outlined the entire reason for MEI's existence." He paused again. "And the other dozen businesses Monty has his hands in."

"None of this is helping, Jimmie. Monty Green is one of the super-rich. Got that. His right-hand man is Ritchie Gibson." I'd heard of him, just like I'd heard of Monty. You couldn't be semi-conscious without coming across Ritchie Gibson's name. Boy genius. "But none of that means diddly with that." I waved my hand at the gearworks blueprint.

Jimmie smiled and exhaled. "Yeah. And I'm not sure how much I can really explain. You know much about quantum mechanics?" He nodded when I told him I didn't have a fucking clue. "Okay. Well, in your physics classes, remember Newton's three laws of thermodynamics?" I nodded, barely remembering what they were, but remembering there were three. "It turns out there are similar ideas in the quantum physics realm as well. And, just like Steampunk machines render classic thermodynamics, Steampunk quantum machines do the same for information theory."

He could see I wasn't getting it. "It's okay. I don't understand most of it myself. Here's the Cliff notes version: all of the machines we've become accustomed to," he waved his hand around the room, "are all based on classic physics. You push down on this, the other side goes up. You turn a screw, it moves in and out. Yeah?"

I nodded, not really seeing where this was going.

"Steampunk is all about 'what-if scenarios' from the mid 19th century. Blimps, leather and brass. But what if computers had been built using steam engines?" He paused when he saw my expression. "Yeah. Well, it's...yeah. Ada Lovelace? Charles Babbage? You read about them in your CS classes right?" I nodded, he continued. "Anywhoo, they struggled to figure out how to build a computer...an analytics engine is how they called it...using the most advanced technology they had. What if they had succeeded in building their analytics engine using steam power? That's one thread of steampunk, along with all of the other leather and brass stuff." He waved his hands again.

"This is the Cliff notes?"

He smiled when he saw I was kidding. I was still nervous as hell, my eyes flitting to the damn blueprint. He shouldn't have that thing here. I knew that much.

"Okay okay. Yeah. Anyway, Sir Gibbons has been working in quantum mechanics since he was six, or whatever, and it occurred to him that you could talk about quanta like the Victorians talked about steam particles. Only instead of thermodynamic principles substitute information theory."

None of this was making sense. "But Jimmie! Newton's stuff was all about mass conservation, what has that got to do with information?"

He screwed up his mouth and nodded. "I know right? That's why Gibbons is the genius. But you can see the parallels, right? Like, entropy is the idea of systems becoming disordered, yeah? For the quantum steampunkers, entropy is the idea of information disordering." He stopped and looked at me.

I could get that part, even if I didn't really understand it. "Okayyyy....so, why the fuck does that look like a 19th century gearwork?"

He laughed. "I know. These guys are totally ironic. All the time. They're living on some other plane." He quieted. "Literally, I think, sometimes." He stared back up at me and before I knew what he was doing, he leaned over, wrapped his arms around me and pulled me into a kiss.

Mid-May 32

I opened the message.

Subject: Security Review

May 12, 2023, 10:30AM

Location: HQ03.14.30

Meeting Organizer: MiltHodgson, Director CorpSec

Anne,

I apologize for the short notice. Can I impose on you to meet with me today? I see your calendar is open, but of course, if a different time would be easier, feel free to propose another slot.

Milt

Weird, weird, weird with a beard weird Dir MiltHodgson HQB2.0.3. I looked at the clock. An hour and 15 minutes. At least he had the courtesy of meeting me on a Blue2 floor.

I might as well have not come into work given how little brain space I had after getting that invite. I let the team know I was going offline for the morning, and turned my attention to cleaning out my inbox, wiping down my desk, anything that required nothing more than my autonomic nervous system could handle. If it was really bad, I'd already be escorted out of the building. Which only helped a smidgeon. Cuz it didn't tell me What The FUCK HODGSON WANTED WITH ME!???

My heart was racing. Definitely it was racing. But other than the stuff with Jimmie, I couldn't think of a reason why Dir MiltHodgson HQB2.0.3 would want to meet with me. As I puttered, I scanned my templates looking for the one I used to use in grade school when the teacher told me to stay after class. Guilt and shame, shame, guilt. The words resonated with my heartbeat, until I found it in my memory palace, in a dusty room, stored on a shelf, long unused. I smiled thinly with misplaced pride at how little I'd needed it since I was a kid. It wasn't that I'd changed, or learned anything different; it was that the kids around me had gotten worse as high school went on, and I just faded into the background. And in college, well, that wasn't even a thing in college.

As I walked to the conference room, I could feel my endocrine system settling down, my heart rate only mildly elevated, the template taking over.

The door was open and Dir MiltHodgson HQB2.0.3 was seated, ticky-tacking into his screen. He looked up as I knocked and walked in, his face breaking into a smile.

"Ms. Scolfield! Anne." He gestured to a chair across the table and sat down. "It's been a few months since our mid-90 together. Life continuing to treat you well at MEI?"

I nodded and returned a small smile, settling into the chair. "Yes, thank you Mr. Hodgson...erm...Milt...?"

"Please. Milt." He looked down at his watch and back up. "Mr. Hodgson is my dad."

I responded with what I hoped was the proper acknowledgment of the joke; even I could tell it was a throw-away line he used a lot.

"I suspect you're a little anxious about being called into a meeting with the head of security on short notice, yes?"

Looking at his face, I could see, superficially, that he was being...disarming...I think was the right word, and my trust meter was of no help in this situation--of course I inherently trusted him--but the template's insulation, protecting me from my inner feelings of guilt, also muffled the trust defaults. In short, I gave him the outward emotion of curiosity mixed with mild anxiety. I nodded, reinforcing an affect of concern.

"I'm sorry for that. There really isn't anything to be worried about. In fact, I think you're going to find this conversation to be...umm...intriguing."

"Oh!" I let slip out before I could control my tongue. "I mean, it's already 'intriguing'--as in intrigue." I almost slapped my face. Stupid stupid stupid! But miraculously he laughed.

"Yes! That's pretty funny..."

Once again, I wasn't trying to be funny. Ahh well.

"...and you're right. I would have scheduled this next week, but I've been invited to a conference and I didn't want this to wait any longer than necessary." He closed his screen, sat back and folded his hands over his mid-section. Dir MiltHodgson HQB2.0.3 was a very fit 40-something and was giving all of the appearance of being relaxed.

I was anything but relaxed, but the template was providing the guidance, and, my affect, as usual was unreadable. Shit! Was I supposed to have said something? I'd lost track of the conversation. Fucking nerves!

"You might recall, during your mid-90, you offered me some feedback on the quizzes...?"

Shit shit shit! I knew I shouldn't have said anything! "Mmm hmmm," I answered, eyebrows raised slightly per the template's spec.

"I brought that feedback to the team, and, well, there was something interesting that came out of our conversation." He sat forward, sliding the screen to the side, his hands folded into a cup, knuckles facing me. "Your suggestions about the ambiguity of the questions' phrasing were helpful," he stared at me, his face as soft as a Director of CorpSec's face could get. "But what was of greater interest to the team was the fact that you offered those insights at all."

That caught me by surprise, which meant my eyes flicked a little to the side and back. My eyebrows lowered slowly and I continued the motion down, furrowing my brow. "Say again?"

He grunted and sat back. "We offer that quiz to every incoming employee..."

Well, that answered that question - $24K / year on that mid-90 Security Refresh Meeting --

"...and out of thousands of folks, you were among a small handful who mentioned the problem."

His choice of words distracted me momentarily. I envisioned tiny hands holding the group of us before I snapped myself back. He was expecting something from me. "Oh?"

He nodded, scanning my face, his attention distracted again by his watch. "So, I wanted to chat with you about an opportunity to help CorpSec out."

Here it comes. I felt the tension ease from my back, careful to not move or let him know I'd just relaxed. The template had worked. Exactly as I last remembered it. My eyebrows went back up slightly. "An opportunity...?"

"I don't have to tell you that MEI takes security seriously," he began and then stopped. "In fact, that was just plain stupid. You know how seriously MEI takes security; I don't need to insult your intelligence. It's pretty clear from your folio that you're one of the smartest hires we've made in the past six months. So, when a smart young woman comes to our attention, well, we'd like to find a way to...umm...it's in MEI's best interests to find a way to work together on some of the most pressing security issues we face."

Folio? Young woman? That's what I got out of his flurry of words. That and awkward. He was just screaming awkward at me. But I didn't know why I felt that way. I just felt awkward...because of him...for him...young woman. Sheesh! Folio. Of course they were keeping a folio on me. Shit! He was expecting a response. "Um...I'm...flattered...Mr. H...Milt. Are you suggesting you're going to transfer me into CorpSec out of AdminConsole group...Milt?" My mind was racing: who was going to finish up the code I was working on? Would I get a raise?

He laughed. A short bark, which he tried to tone down with a cough. "No, no, no. Anne. Definitely not. We don't want to hire you away from your work. Exactly the opposite! We need you to do exactly what you're doing. We need smart, curious and inquisitive people like you in all areas of the company to help maintain our security."

He went on like that for a little longer, but I was already figuring out what he wanted from me. Snitch. CorpSec maintained security through infiltration throughout the organization. I let him wind down. "I think I see, Milt. And I get why CorpSec could use the help. What, specifically, would you need me to do?" I said it as gently as I could imagine saying it.

His expression hardened, just enough to tell me we were moving into different part of the discussion. I noticed the clock out of the corner of my eye. We'd been sitting here for about seven minutes. From what I'd learned in graduate school, the real negotiations don't happen until five minutes before the meeting's end. But maybe Milt used a different playbook.

"So, first off, if you do decide to take us up on our offer, and I hope you do, nothing will change: your duties, your clearance, your reporting structure...it'll all be as it is right now. Behind the scenes, we'll be routing your traffic a little differently, and we'll give you access to a secure site to document anything that you think needs to be reported."

I twisted my mouth a little, counting to five. "Really? That's all?"

He nodded. "Oh," he added, "and you'll have a regular 30 minute meeting, once a month, with one of our team."

I nodded and looked down, retrieving the 'secure site' thing. "Erm, this 'secure site,' thing--what am I supposed to be reporting on?"

I suppose he thought the smile he gave me was meant to be reassuring, but I'd never been more frightened by a smile than what I saw on Dir CorpSec MiltHodgson HQB2.0.3's face in that moment. As usual, I just froze, so he couldn't tell how freaked out I was, but that only made it worse: I sat there staring at that smile, even as I felt my insides turning to ash.

"Shoot! There is one other responsibility, but it's a one-time thing: we'll get you into a two hour training where they'll help you understand what it is we're looking for in that report." He didn't stop smiling the entire time, the bones of his skull nearly replacing the skin and flesh on his face.