Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears by William Hertling Read Free Book Online Page B

grateful that the campus had returned to a somewhat normal decorum after the insanity of the hunt for the billiard room that morning. On some deep level, he was curious about the mystery of the moving room, but he hated the way that the kids around him turned it into a superficial game, as they did with everything.
    He searched the pockets of his old suit looking for a note he had written down. His rumpled suit and graying, disheveled hair was a stark contrast to the young, hip employees dressed in the latest designer jeans or fashionable retro sixties clothing. Nor did he fit in with the young, geeky employees in their plaid shirts or T shirts with obscure logos. Not to mention the young, smartly dressed marketing employees in their tailored business casual wear. Fitting in and impressing others weren’t high on his list of priorities.
    As he approached his own office from the coffee station, he found a young blonde girl knocking on his office door. “Can I help you?” he asked, temporarily halting the search for the missing note.
    “ I’m looking for Gene Keyes,” she said in a bubbly voice. “I’m Maggie Reynolds, and I...”
    “ I’m Gene,” he said, cutting her off. “Come in.” Gene opened the door, and walked into his office. The girl could follow him or not.
    “ Uh, my boss sent me because he’s missing four...” She trailed off.
    Gene put his coffee cup down, and took a seat. He looked up to see an astonished look on the girl’s face.
    “ Wow, I didn’t know anyone still used... Wow, look at all this paper.”
    Gene looked around, despite himself. Yes, it was true his office was piled with computer printouts. Stacks of good, old fashioned 8.5x11 paper were littered everywhere. Oversized plotter printouts with huge spreadsheets and charts hung from the walls. The centerpiece of the office, the desk he currently sat behind, was a 1950s era wooden desk that nearly spanned the width of the office. It might have been the only furnishing in the entire building complex manufactured in the previous century. Incongruously, the desk was far larger in every dimension than the doorway. The people with a good brain on their heads, usually engineers, but occasionally a smart manager, those who trusted their guts, instincts, and eyes, but took little for granted, they’d come into the office, and their eyes would bounce back and forth between the desk and the door trying to puzzle it out. Sadly, she didn’t appear to be one of them.
    “ Wow, is this continuous feed dot matrix paper?” the young woman asked, coming round his desk. She fondled a stack of green and white striped paper on a side table. Her eyebrows went up, and her jaw went down. “I saw this in a movie once! Hey, do you have any punchcards?” she asked earnestly, turning to him.
    It rankled Gene to hear the same comments from every kid that walked in the door. He sat a little straighter in his wooden office chair, the same chair he liberated from the army the day he was discharged.
    “ Some things are better on paper,” he explained calmly, not for the first time. “Paper is consistent. It doesn’t say one thing one day and a different thing a different day. And, no, before you ask, I don’t have punchcards. I’m not preserving the stuff for a museum. This is how I do my job.” Gene tried to work some venom into his voice, but what came out just sounded tired. Gene knew what she would say next, because he heard some variation of it from everyone who came into the office.
    “ You know we work for Avogadro right?” Maggie smiled as she said it.
    Gene knew it. He also knew he worked in the Controls and Compliance department, what they used to properly call the Audit department. When push came to shove, paper never lied.
    “ Uh huh,” he grumbled, ignoring that whole line of thinking. “So, what can I help you with?”
    “ Well, I have this problem. See, the finance database says we’re supposed to have more than four million dollars