Chapter 12
“Morning, Mike,” I said, stopping beside the safety cage.
He leaned against the railing, wiping his hands on a shop rag. “Heard some corporate suits from Chicago were wandering around the server room yesterday afternoon. Looking at the routers like they were trying to figure out which end the toast comes out of.”
“Just some consultants doing an audit,” I said.
Mike rolled his eyes. “Every time somebody with a shiny briefcase shows up, they want to change the shift schedules or tell us how to load the scrap bins. George used to keep ‘em up in the front office where they couldn't break anything. How’s the new boss?”
I looked back down the long corridor of Bay 2. A string of automated guided vehicles was rolling past, each one carrying two tons of stamped floor pans, their yellow beacons flashing silently as they followed the magnetic tracks embedded in the concrete. Every single one of them was reporting its velocity, battery charge, and payload weight back to my servers sixty miles away, adjusting their spacing by three millimeters every second so they never bunched up at the crossover point.
“She’s learning the business, Mike,” I said.
Mike chuckled. “Well, tell her to leave the press timing alone. Runs better right now than it has in twenty years.”
“I’ll make sure she knows,” I told him.
I patted the yellow safety rail, walked through the bay doors, and stepped out into the crisp, October air of the employee parking lot.
My old Ford F-150 was parked in the fifth row, right where I’d left it at seven-thirty that morning. Its faded blue paint had a few rock chips on the hood, and the driver’s side floorboard had a slight smudge of red grease from an emergency call I’d taken two winters ago on a frozen Saturday night.
I tossed my briefcase onto the passenger seat, set my ThinkPad on the console, and climbed into the cab.
The engine turned over with a deep, steady growl on the first turn of the key.
I sat there for a minute, letting the oil pressure come up to normal operating temperature, watching the steam rise from the exhaust stacks on the roof of the main facility.
Twenty-four hundred people were working in that building. In six hours, the second shift would arrive, punch their cards, and take their places beside machines that would start without hesitation, perform their cycles without error, and shut down cleanly when the final whistle blew.