The Shining Rock Grand

By William Winslow

A lawyer who’s losing his job. A keeker who’s losing his mind. A courtier who’s lost his colony.
Kay Pettaway is a troubled psychic entrepreneur who just wants to find a wife and take his remote-view company public before he cycles back into rehab. But his clients have other priorities—the war on drugs, mineral rights on the coastal plain, a 500-year-old conspiracy—and aren’t reluctant to subvert Kay’s gifts for their own deadly ends. In a story that accelerates from the board rooms of Charlotte, to the mountains of the Blue Ridge, to the wild Outer Banks, we trace his path across North Carolina, a singular corner of the South, where enduring histories, landscapes and languages face down a bewitching aesthetic and technological future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781304300799

Book preview

The Shining Rock Grand

THE SHINING ROCK GRAND

By

William Winslow

A lawyer who’s losing his job.  A keeker who’s losing his mind.  A courtier who’s lost his colony.

Kay Pettaway is a troubled psychic entrepreneur who just wants to find a wife and take his remote-view company public before he cycles back into rehab.  But his clients have other priorities—the war on drugs, mineral rights on the coastal plain, a 500-year-old conspiracy—and aren’t reluctant to subvert Kay’s gifts for their own deadly ends.  In a story that accelerates from the board rooms of Charlotte, to the mountains of the Blue Ridge, to the wild Outer Banks, we trace his path across North Carolina, a singular corner of the South, where enduring histories, landscapes and languages face down a bewitching aesthetic and technological future.

This book is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 William Winslow

All rights reserved

For Bob

THE SHINING ROCK GRAND

1.  DISEQUILIBRIUM

2.  ESCAPE VELOCITY

3.  RISK FACTORS

4.  THE PEELE STREET STRUGGLE

5.  NOT PICTURED

INTERLOGUE:  THE INTERROGATION OF DARBY GLAVIN

6.  DEATH CARD PIROUETTE

7.  BETWEEN THE BANKS

8.

9.  BEYOND THE BREAKERS

10.  PERSON OF INTEREST

11.  ROLL CALL

12.  THE FINAL FOUR

1.  DISEQUILIBRIUM

Never mind the truth—pursue probability through thick and thin in every kind of speech; the whole secret of the art of speaking lies in consistent adherence to this principle.

—Plato, Phaedrus 272

Colt Kasey scrambled out of his car.  He’d been driving all day and it was still raining.  Pulling the hood on his jacket over his head, he waved quickly to Mrs. Carmody standing at her picture window and ran up the steps to the second floor apartment. 

Marcia was sitting at the kitchen table.

God, I was just thinking of you, she said.  It’s really coming down out there.

I drove as far as Aberdeen, then worked my way back, Colt said quietly.  Guess I’ll head toward Olympia tomorrow.

I could put a hamburger in the microvex.

Don’t bother.  I can take care of it.  Any mail?

Bills mostly.  Something from some place in North Carolina.  Looks like junk.

There was a warehouse job that looked good, Colt said.  I left an application.  They wanted somebody that knew Spreadsheet.

Nothing an ax-man like you can’t handle.

Colt’s great-grandfather had come to the Northwest in the last century to work on the logging gangs.  The Kaseys had been here ever since.

Do you notice anything different? Marcia asked.

Usually he did.  Sometimes in the past anything different had caused him to grow impatient, irritable or worse.  He studied Marcia’s feet and legs, her eyes and hair, and her hands, which were worn and chapped from cleaning houses.

She cheated toward the corner of the living/dining room.  The bucket that had sat there for the last three months was gone.

You fixed the leak!  Fantastic!  It looks great.  How’d you do it?

Marcia proudly explained how she had caulked around the skylight, gone over the puckered-up parts of the ceiling with her hair dryer and sanded and spackled the bad places.  Mrs. Carmody said she had a can of paint that would match, plus she had agreed to take something off the rent for next month and...

Marcia, he interrupted her.

Yeah honey.

I thought about having a drink today.

She walked over to him, a hard expression on her face.

What kind of thoughts?

I pulled into the parking lot of that contract store off of 101.

Oh Colt.

I had my money ready.  He felt himself tearing up.

Marcia stared straight in his eyes, the way he had known she would.  It was strength, reproach, hurt, understanding and love all at once.  It was the look that had kept him from opening the car door in that parking lot.

She gave him a quick hug.  No big deal, and he was all right again.  Let me get you that hamburger, she said.  I think we’ve got some mayonnaise left.

He opened the junk mail first.  The bills would keep.

The North Carolina letter was from something called Croatan Point Ltd.  It said that Colt had been identified as the holder of a remote interest in a small parcel of swamp land in the Eastern part of the state.  Apparently, after transfers from generation to generation, there were hundreds of owners, many of whom now lived far away and were unaware they had any rights to the property.

That’s for sure, said Colt.  He had never heard anyone in the family, not even the old-timers, speak of it.

The letter went on to point out that the land was located far from any city, was infested with insects and poorly drained, and had on more than one occasion been slated for condemnation by governmental authorities, all of which tended to depress its market value.  Moreover, the fact that ownership rested in so many hands made decision-making difficult and jeopardized any likelihood of ever monetizing one’s interest.

I guess that’s another way of saying they can’t figure out how to sell it, said Marcia.

Nothing I need more right now than getting hung up with a bunch of Southern rednecks, said Colt.

Marcia took the letter and went over it.  Colt, this says Croatan Point is authorized for a limited time to offer you up to $2,500 for your share once they’ve received adequate verification.  All you have to do is call them.

He looked over her shoulder, reading more carefully this time.  How about that, he said when he was finished.  Damn.  Do you think it’s for real?  Maybe we should run it by a lawyer first.  I know a guy in Raymond.

There’s an 866 number on the letter.  Couldn’t hurt to give them a call.  It won’t cost a thing, Marcia said.

They don’t have the ‘Jr.’ on my name; I wonder if this was meant for Dad.

I’d say it doesn’t matter as long as the check clears.  Plus you inherited whatever was his, didn’t you?

Colt looked into Marcia’s eyes.  Then he looked at her hands.  For the first time all day, he felt himself relax. 

Hell, it’s $2,500, he said.

Sounds like a no-brainer, said Marcia.

Colt smiled. 

Yeah, he laughed.  I guess we can do those.

Pactolus walked quickly along the drab pine trail.  It was a warm winter morning.  Out barely an hour and already he had shed two layers.  The shirts clung to his backpack like shriveled decals.  He hadn’t brought enough water.  Once he hit the peat flats, the sun would be all over him.  There were still three and a half miles to go, and the neutron probe weighed 75 pounds.

By the beaver dam, the trail faded left, and a burning white ridge of sand shunted him away from the bog.  A wren whistled out of the woods; Pactolus saw its Cleopatra eyes.  The pin oak was just ahead.  Reaching it, Pactolus put down his pack, pulled out his big collapsible canteen and dropped off the trail.  At the bottom of an improbably steep dip, he elbowed his way through a dense clump of inkberry and saw the slight gash in the earth.  Falling to his knees, he brushed away the dead leaves, scooped out just enough stubble for his canteen to fit and filled it with pure water from the cool Pocosin spring.

A few miles up the trail and he began to see little Kevlar pennants scattered about.  BIPED, the regional agency that ran just about everything in these parts, had drilled test holes all over the area and never found any appreciable grade.  Now, with supplies dwindling and the whole world desperate for yellowcake, they were at it again.  You had to admire the District’s gumption.  It wasn’t like they knew anything about mineralogy.  All they had to work with were a couple of preliminary surveys, a few anecdotal reports and some really hopeless equipment.  That and a breathtaking desire for money.

Just before noon Pactolus came to the trail spur, where he had a light lunch and tried to think what he would do if he really found ore.  At first it had seemed like a reasonable proposition.  Get BIPED off his back, create a few jobs, maybe even save the planet in the process.  Today, he wasn’t so sure.  The more he learned, the more post-mortems he read, about contamination in places like Texas, Cotaje and Niger, the more he wondered if the whole enterprise wasn’t some profoundly ill-conceived caper, just another indictment of the whole idea that there could be such a thing as human progress.  Maybe Kay, or at least the vibe Kay had given off before he split, was right.  So much of what existed on the material plane was illusory.  It was more important to find harmony with the world, to reach equilibrium, to watch and wait for enlightenment, rather than poison the world with man’s continuous experimentation, his unending mania of doing.  Let your anger abate, avoid unprofitable thoughts, retire from the world.  Look where the opposite has brought us.

Incorrect.  It had to be, or else Pactolus’s entire upbringing had been a fraud.  What was it his father had told him after the breakdown?  Just do something, even if it’s wrong.  Those words had saved his life.  The thing was, the universe didn’t sit still.  Why should he?

Take uranium-238.  Any wildcatter will tell you.  Leave a formation of pitchblende alone for a few eons and eventually you start to find measurable quantities of its daughter elements, like bismuth-214 and lead-214, the jittery isotopes into which uranium naturally decays.  If you happen to have a scintillation meter, or even an old 20th-century Geiger counter, you can detect the radiation emitted by these unstable nuclides.  Find gamma rays from the daughters and there’s a good chance you’ll find the surviving mother uranium, right where she’s been all along, behind the scenes, in her shawl, her combs and orthopedic shoes, her English, you know, it’s-a-not so good, humming a song from the old country, as the amaretti bake in her radioactive kitchen.

But look again.  What if the universe has intervened?  What if uranium has leached out of a vein due to hydrothermal activity?  What if the rupture of a geologic fault or some other traumatic event has remobilized it across the ore field?  Gamma logging has inherent limits.  U-238 which has been in its location less than two million years shows barely any decay chain.  You could be standing on top of the richest claim in the territory and not even get a reading.

From the spur, Pactolus walked thirty paces due east, turned left at the stake and continued up the narrow path to an artfully stacked pile of rocks.  He removed these, then spent a good fifteen minutes wrestling with and finally disconnecting the frozen borehole cap.

The rest went very quickly.  Pactolus set up the generation device and inserted the business end of it into the ground.  He flipped some switches to activate the pulse drive, which fired up the deuterium accelerator, causing neutrons to stream down the borehole at 14 MeV.  The beauty of the system was that it didn’t matter if you found gamma particles or not.  The fast neutrons triggered a mini-nuclear reaction, splitting any fissionable uranium-235 in the lode into isotopes of krypton and barium, plus a couple of flamboyant epithermal neutrons.  The machine revealed the presence of the thing you were looking for, not some dodgy by-product. 

Pactolus studied the detection screen.  Just as he had expected, the subsurface sands were highly mineralized.  The neutron count was off the charts.  He rubbed a few calculations into the touchpad.  Based on the standard ratio of U-235 to U-238, it appeared the average grade of the formation was close to 20%.  Unless he missed his guess, Pactolus had just discovered the most highly concentrated uranium deposit in the United States.

Now what?

By the time he got back to the clinic, it was almost nine.  Dinner was over and the lights on the wards had all gone dim.  Pactolus let himself in the rear entrance of the building and made the long walk to his office.  Somebody was smoking; not so unusual at this facility, except it smelled like tobacco. 

The lamp in his office was on.

Nice of you to stop in, David.

Tucker Guernsey was sitting in Pactolus’s desk chair.  Pactolus was surprised at how violated this made him feel.  In his stubby pink hands Guernsey was holding a framed photograph—a picture of Pactolus’s parents.  The cigar, ashy at one end, lubricated with saliva at the other, was balanced over the edge of the desk beside a thick folder of papers.

You know, it’s remarkable what you can find out about people in my line of work, Guernsey continued.  When I took over at District, I got access to just about any kind of information you’d care to imagine.

Pactolus felt himself color, exposed, put to shame here in his office, his bunker.  Guernsey set down the photograph.  He puffed the cigar in Pactolus’s direction.  Then he picked up the folder and began thumbing its pages.

I mean, here’s Dr. David Pactolus, Tar Heel of the Week.  North Carolina’s crusading young scientist.  Our great humanitarian.  Not to mention president of the Brody Jaycees.  You never had a problem making a buck off other people’s suffering did you?  I wonder what people would say if they found out the good doctor had his own set of preexisting conditions?  That little nervous episode of yours, for example; wouldn’t want that getting out would you—ah, here it is: ‘hospitalized for—’

Pactolus lunged across the desk, but he only got so far.  Before he could take the records away, he felt himself being grabbed from behind and twirled around, into the line of a hard fist.  The first punch burned his face, but somehow he managed to remain standing.  The second one landed at an angle and threw him against a bookshelf.  The BIPED goon came right at him, this time to knock him out for good.

That’s enough, Bo, said Guernsey.  He took one more draw on the cigar, then stubbed it out in a trash can.  Taking the folder, he rose from the chair, buttoned his suit jacket and swaggered toward Pactolus, who was still conscious, still standing, and thanks to the skill with which the blows had been struck, not likely to show any signs of having nearly been given a concussion.

No.  I think David has probably gotten the message.  Haven’t you, David?  He put his lips a few inches from Pactolus’s ear, so close Pactolus could smell the skin, the hot, fetid incinerator breath.  Don’t you ever take off wild like that again, he threatened.  You go out prospecting, it’s with our people.  This is a BIPED deal.  You understand?

Pactolus nodded.

The next time it won’t be just Bo to worry about, said Guernsey.  I’ll shut your ass down.  Believe me, I know what the hell you’re up to out here.

2.  ESCAPE VELOCITY

The plaintiff goes first.

—Curry on the Obvious, p. 1.

Not a city, not a town—just a spread.

McAdam stood 88 stories up the Union National Tower, peering through the curtainwall over the beautiful endless moraine that was North Charlotte.  It was early March, not yet dawn; the traffic lights out Tryon blinked in useless synchrony all the way to the Margin.  Closer in, the maglev from Chicago, an attenuated white-fringed bead of mercury, arrived with grimmer than usual effect, perhaps because McAdam had never gotten used to seeing the beginning and end of a train at once, perhaps because it was the only time he saw snow any more.

He picked his way through the Bullpen, the catacomb of cubicles that passed for associates’ offices at the firm of Coker & Curry.  Stopping at his own control panel, which glowed a motivational shade of blue, he checked the late scores (Poparic Has 33 as State Nips Blue Devils), and looked over his mail.  Most of the messages were from his boss, Ron Craven, and consisted of a single word: Status?  Pissed on and pissed off, thought McAdam.  There was one more, from Iva, his wife:  Where are you?

He dialed up line reports.  The robots had been busy all night.  CR-3 had responded to one set of antitrust interrogatories and was starting another; CR-4, with that sad stupid look in its scanners, was finishing up a settlement agreement with counterparts in Tel Aviv and Santiago, some sort of three-tier currency deal gone bad.  In the penthouse—on winter evenings they liked to put partnerships to sleep up there—the bankruptcy group’s new auto-closer blurred away in the dark.  That left 1 and 2 free to handle McAdam’s special responsibility for the day, the Mind’s Eye prospectus, which, God and the underwriters willing, would hit the street simultaneously in the U.S. and South China within the next 48 hours.  McAdam rolled his head like a boxer, strapped on his billing meter and slumped into the console, surprised again that he was actually playing a role in the affairs of the world.  He was a senior attorney in a venerable firm.  The future of an exciting new company depended on him.  At times like these, he almost forgot his other problems, almost loved the law.

McAdam flipped back to the first message in his queue.  It was from Craven, time-stamped 1:30 AM.  "Mac, please get to the office ASAP.  Mind’s Eye is ready to price.  They’ve scheduled a drafting session for nine.  Liv and I are staying at the Ritz and need you to get the prospectus updated in time for us to review ahead of the meeting.  The underwriters are pushing this.  Tony Patel and Gary Chan are both flying in.   Basso, Stokes and Bunn will be driving down from the company.  Kay too.  Have you heard from him?"

Kay Pettaway was one of the pioneers of the paranormal industry.  But Mind’s Eye Corp., the remote view lab he had incorporated five years ago, had been late to the capital markets, left behind in a stampede of psi firms with slicker business plans and more presentable management teams.  Now, with Craven’s help, Mind’s Eye had finally engaged a legitimate banker, Antony Patel of Gliston East, and managed to attract enough institutional interest to successfully market a small initial public offering.  All they needed to do was tone down the company’s prospectus to clear it through the SEC.  If all went well, within a week Mind’s Eye would close the stock sale and take in 50 million dollars of badly needed cash.  If all went well, perhaps McAdam would even hold on to his job.

The phone rang and a lot of digits sprayed across the display—overseas call.  McAdam had been dreading it since he got in the office.  Jude Roper was his best client, a wildly successful venture capitalist, a businessman who paid attention to documents and said nothing but good things about McAdam to his network of investors and entrepreneurs.  But he was, as he would have been the first to admit, a maverick, and every time he called it was back to kangaroo court.  Though his fund had only a small position in Mind’s Eye, Roper always swung for the fences; he wouldn’t hesitate to queer a deal for a few point of upside.

Hey Jude, said McAdam, tugging on his headset.  Where are you?

Mac, that you?  You gotta speak up.  I’m at Charles de Gaulle, waiting to catch a plane to Stockholm.  I just wanted to see how we’re making out on the IPO...What’s everybody taking a break or something?

Well no, I just got here, actually.  The meeting’s not scheduled to start until nine our time.  We’ve still got another two hours before the bankers get in.

How about the company?  Has the management team arrived?

Kay’s driving down from Raleigh.  The rest of them are coming too.  You heard about the love letter we got from Wade Basso and Lura Stokes—

Sure I did.  They’re getting the VIP treatment?

Right.  We’ve got our functions head handling it personally.  Of course Craven and Liv came down last night...stayed at the Ritz.

"Oh, I see, said Roper, blown off stride, but only for a moment.  Well, how’s our CEO looking?  We gonna make it to the finish line?  Easter comes early this year you know."

Kay?  Like I say, he’s not here yet.  We hear he’s taking his chems, and his levels are being checked every couple of days.  But I haven’t seen him since the org meeting.  You know how it is with him.

Can’t we hook him up to continuous monitoring or something?  My gosh, what year do you think this is, 2012?  They’ve got some pretty spiffy diagnostics out now.  These guys can get off real quickly in the cold.

You wanna suggest that?

"No, no.  I’m trying to keep a low profile since I went off the Board; but somebody needs to be on top of it.  You remember the Clarita offering don’t you?  I’m still underwater on that pig, and the market risk on this company is even worse.  Have you been watching the indexes?"

My God, that’s the least of your worries, thought McAdam.  But he played along.  Funny you should bring it up, McAdam said.  What we are hearing is that the window for the keek shops could close at any time.  Indeed, it seemed like every pad-site on the Corridor was occupied by a traded company; if past experience held true, it was only a matter of time before the market hiccuped and the class actions began.  The underwriters say we need to wrap this transaction up now, even if we have to drop the range, or we may have to wait a year.

Jeez, I must get that every deal.  I hope you aren’t falling for that crap, Roper sniffed.  "Look Mac, you remember how I started on this process.  I said we have the best remote viewing company of the lot, and I still believe it.  We ought to be confident, maybe even swagger a little.  We’ve got revenues for God’s sake.  The range is ten to twelve dollars per share in the letter of intent; this is the first I’ve heard about dropping it, and frankly I’ll have a hard time convincing my committee to take any less.  There are plenty of underwriters out there; if this group can’t sell a deal in the range, then we’ll just have to find someone who can...

And besides, he appended. The documents say I don’t have to convert my preferred below ten, right?

Sometimes McAdam wondered why he got out of bed in the morning.  How could people ask him questions like this, especially when he was trying to work?  The preferred stock had so many bells and whistles, there was no way the IPO could go forward if it didn’t convert.  But whether the venture capitalists like Roper would have to give up their rights at an offering price less than ten dollars per share was an open question.  The Mind’s Eye charter was more than a little ambiguous on the subject, which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except McAdam had drafted it.

I suppose we could call Bangalore and scare up someone to read the papers for you, commented McAdam, by way of changing the subject.  Jude, just tell me one thing.  Do you really intend to keep funding if a deal can’t be done at ten?  We’re running on fumes now as it is.

Mac, it’s not like there’s any overhead in these companies.  The bulk of it is HR expense, and Kay just uses consultants to supplement his production needs—

Yeah, I’ve met some of those guys—

He could offload another layer of management, cut the burn rate in half tomorrow and not touch sales or R&D one bit.

That’s not strictly true.  The company has been planning a big systems buy for months.  Storage, logging, telemetry:  the works.  If they put it off any longer, we’re asking for trouble.  It’s not like the human mind is really built to operate in this channel for more than a few minutes at a time.

Oh, give me a break.  Most of those packages are available off-the-shelf for next to nothing.  You and I both know how resourceful Kay can be.  I’m telling you his problem is he’s got half the payroll hanging around the house when they should be on the road in front of customers four or five days a week.

Well, all I can say is that the other founders—

—every one of whom should be riffed tomorrow, interjected Roper, as if McAdam were making the case.

—to whom Kay has tremendous personal loyalty— continued McAdam without missing a step, —they have been waiting a long time for this offering.  Most of them got in at a penny a share or less.  As far as they’re concerned, a buck or two off the price is mice nuts.  It’s not going to cause them any heartburn.

And I’m sure the bankers know that, said Roper.  Which is what scares the hell out of me.

McAdam heard a gate announcement in French rattle in the background.

Mac, I’m depending on you guys.  You and Craven keep after ‘em, OK?  By the way, have you given any thought to my other proposal?  I’d be happy to sit down with you one day and go over the details.

Oh, the job thing?  Yeah, I’m considering it quite a bit, McAdam said, suddenly feeling pathetic.  There was that stab again, and another.  He wondered if he needed to Talk to Somebody.  Lately the black urges had gotten worse.  At first he had shrugged them off—nothing major, everybody had them, right?  These days suicidal thoughts were just something in the air, another side effect, like a minor skin irritation.  There was sure to be stress, what with the shameful job market, the endless competition, every last bit of the potential that had been pumped into him as a boy in the Blue Ridge Mountains now bled out on the flatlands, where the pressure lay on you like a rockslide and nobody would ever shut up.  Secretly, he looked down on everyone, never expected to fit in.  He lived in fear of his message machine, the e-mails and texts, the projects he had blown, regretted a working life frittered away in a world where no covenant was ever honored, no debt was ever paid, no signatory was who he said he was, and no contractual provision was even enforceable.  He had given up trying not to disappoint Iva, who had long ago taken over the reins of their marriage.  But none of that was the real problem.  There was something more.  Every other day, it seemed, he found himself being overtaken by strange moods, memory lapses, detours from reality always accompanied by sinking desperate feelings he couldn’t explain.  He didn’t know where to turn.  It wasn’t something you could talk to the preacher about; he had tried.  That was the worst: a confounding sickness that came in attacks he could never predict and nobody to help.  He had no idea where these episodes came from.  All McAdam knew was that if he didn’t figure it out soon, this fever was going to take him down.

I’m looking at several possibilities actually, he went on.  You’re not going to believe this but Iva’s almost got me convinced into relocating to New Hampshire, unless he could somehow commence extensive renovations on their townhouse, find her a new husband or otherwise bribe her out of moving.  I swear it’s not looking too bad.

New Hampshire?  What in hell would you do up there?  Granite swaps?  Sled dog repos?  I thought the two of you were happy here.  Did you call that architect I mentioned?

I gave his name to Iva and told her—

La dernier annonce: Vol cinquante-six a Stockholm.

Well I’m off to talk to the Swedes, said Roper.  Like I said, you and Craven keep shooting at their feet.  He paused a second or two.  They really shacked up at the Ritz last night?

That’s what my sources tell me, McAdam replied.

Roper sighed wistfully.  Jeez.  That guy must have brass balls.

Trucks were beginning to taunt each other at street level, and the world through the curtainwall, or so much of the world as you saw from this altitude—sky, lakes and the reactors beyond—was gradually changing from black and white to color.  There was something special about sunlight from the east, how it crept into the office without an appointment.  McAdam heard the blare of metal detectors, the clap of newspapers landing in the empty lobby, the intramural squawks of commuter planes over Douglas: after seven years at the firm, they were strains with which he was well acquainted.

The translator program, however, was wedged, and no amount of pounding on the Refresh key or fiddling with the power switch could shuffle it back to life.

Spain!  What do I have to do to get my computer working?  McAdam howled into his mike.

Give me a minute, McAdam, replied Deryl Spain in User Support.  I just came on.  We’ve got deadlocks across the network.  The logs show us taking five momentaries since 3:00 AM.

Not my problem, man.  I’ve got a Sino-American prospectus due in forty-five minutes and I can’t even get an interface.  Now what are you going to do about it?

Oh, will I be glad when you’re gone, said Spain.  He gave McAdam the command for a hung terminal, adding matter-of-factly, Not sure how long I can keep you up, though, with the Tripod off-line.  The batteries can only recharge so fast.

Great.  The Lofter Tripod was Coker & Curry’s pride and joy, a superconducting magnetic energy storage device about the size of a file cabinet, but capable of sustaining the building grid at megawatt levels during voltage hits that would otherwise crash the firm’s delicate systems.  It had been acquired some years before, after an electrical disturbance (so it was said) had somehow aroused the robots, causing them to rampage drunkenly across the shop floor, strewing papers and files and chasing terrified paralegals into the stairwells.  Ronald Craven, at the time campaigning to be managing partner, had earnestly vowed it would never happen again.  Like thousands of other lawyers of his generation, he was a dogged advocate for the cult of technology, and with the Tripod commissioned, he wasted no time equipping the firm with the hottest gear and the strongest engineering lineup in the world.  It was a running joke how many chipheads in Topology had window offices, while worker bee attorneys like McAdam spent their days—and the best part of their nights—confined to interchangeable gruntstations in the Bullpen.

Come on baby, one more little upchuck, McAdam cooed to his controller, which was spewing out runes of gibberish as it rebooted.  The processor made a noise that sounded like a dog flapping water off its back.  McAdam said a quick prayer to the gods of clean power, then glanced at the corner of the screen.  8:14.  Everything stopped while he fixed on the digits, not allowing himself even to blink, until the 5 flashed on.  Time was starting to run short.  McAdam fed the English version of the disclosure document into the paper handler, pausing once again to admire the opening sentence:  The commercial dynamics unleashed by mankind’s evolving mastery of luminar poaching across the paranormal spectrum have yet to be satisfactorily exploited.  That was his line, his one brilliant achievement in the profession, composed for the Psychotrope IPO last spring and picked up in virtually every remote viewing prospectus since.

This time the software took.  Thanks to enhancements by the firm’s programmers, the Hsu translator not only plowed through the latest psi jargon—for example, the character it had generated to represent luminar poaching, a variation on the traditional scholastic ideogram for solar eclipse, had gained immediate acceptance in Chinese parapsychological circles—but was also attuned to the niceties of international securities offerings, converting dollars to yuan, finessing accounting differences, even dating the Chinese filing a day later than its U.S. counterpart.  McAdam watched with satisfaction as pages of friendly Mandarin typescript came up on his monitor.

You built your own prison.  A couple of seasons after joining the firm, McAdam had found himself, following his mentor Gordon Curry’s semi-retirement, shy on workload and unable to dodge corporate assignments just as American investigative teams were announcing a series of breakthroughs that would culminate in the isolation late in the decade of a narrow strand of electromagnetic bandwidth associated with augmented psychic activity.  Ron Craven, heretofore strictly a back office minder and grinder, had, through some serendipitous Duke connections, managed to mogul a huge piece of the legal business right at the beginning, securing the first high-psi method patents, joint-venturing important university research and licensing raw clumps