Distraction - Bruce Sterling [30]
Bambakias construction sites always attracted gawkers. But very few construction gawkers would lurk in cold and darkness at one in the morning. Still, even little Buna had a nightlife. Presumably the guy was just drunk.
Oscar cupped his gloved hands to his mouth. “Would you like to help?” This was a standard invitation at any Bambakias site. It was very much part of the game. It was surprising just how many selfless, energetic volunteers had been permanently lured into the Bambakias krewe through this gambit.
The stranger stepped awkwardly through a gap in the orange netting, walking into Oscar’s arc-light.
“Welcome to the site of our future hotel! Have you been to our site before?”
Silent shake of the woolly head.
Oscar climbed down from the spool. He retrieved a box of vacuum-wrapped gloves and carried it over. “Try these.”
The stranger—a woman—pulled bare, spidery hands from the pockets of her coat. Oscar, startled, looked up from her fingers to her shadowed face. “Dr. Penninger! Good morning.”
“Mr. Valparaiso.”
Oscar fetched out a pair of ductile extra-large, their floppy plastic fingers studded with grip-dots. He hadn’t expected any company on the site tonight, much less a ranking member of the Collaboratory’s board. He was taken aback to encounter Greta Penninger under these circumstances, but there was no sense in hesitating now. “Please try these gloves on, Doctor.… You see that yellow ridge of tape across the knuckles? Those are embedded locators, so our construction system will always know the position of your hands.”
Dr. Penninger tugged the gloves on, twisting her narrow wrists like a surgeon washing up.
“You’ll need a hard hat, a back brace, and some shoe caps. Knee guards are a good idea, too. I’ll log you into our system now, if that’s all right.”
Searching through the krewe’s piled supplies in the gloom, Oscar dug up a spare hard hat and some velcro-strapped toe-protectors. Greta Penninger strapped on her construction gear without a word.
“That’s good,” Oscar said. He handed her a pencil-shaped hand-scanner on its plastic lanyard. “Now, Doctor, let me acquaint you with our design philosophy here. You see, at heart, our system’s very flexible and simple. The computer always knows the location of every component that’s been tagged and initialized. The system also has complete algorithms for assembling the building from simple component parts. There are millions of possible ways of getting from start to finish, so it’s just a question of coordinating all the efforts, and always keeping track. Thanks to distributed, parallel, assembly processing …”
“Never mind, I get all that. I was watching you.”
“Oh.” Oscar jammed his spiel back into its can. He tipped up his plastic hard-hat brim and looked her over. She wasn’t kidding. “Well, you do the mortar, and I’ll carry blocks. Can you do mortar?”
“I can do mortar.”
Dr. Penninger began carefully lathering goo with the garrulous trowel. The components chattered on cheerfully, Dr. Penninger said nothing at all, and the pace of Oscar’s work more than doubled. Dr. Penninger was really going after it. It was the middle of the night, it was lonely, desolate, windy, and near freezing, and this scientist really meant business. She worked like a horse. Like a demon.
Curiosity got the best of him. “Why did you come here at this time of night?”
Dr. Penninger straightened, her trowel clutched in her dotted glove. “This is my only free time. I’m always in my lab till midnight.”
“I see. Well, I really appreciate your visit. You’re a very good worker. Thanks for the help.”
“You’re welcome.” She glanced at him searchingly across the airy pool of glare. It might have been a piquant glance if he had found her attractive.
“You should visit us in daylight, when we have the full krewe at work. It’s the coordination of elements, the teamwork, that’s the key to distributed instantiation. The structure simply flies up all at once sometimes, as if it were crystallizing. That’s well worth watching.”
She touched her gloved hand to her chin and examined the block