Qubit's Incubator. Charley Brindley
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can we use it when you have it way the hell over here?”
“It has Wi-Fi. If you’ll get your crayons and a large poster board, I’ll try to draw a picture of how a Wi-Fi peripheral device can be connected to a server. The drawing will be big and simple, something you might comprehend.”
Joe laughed as he left his desk in the bullpen.
McGill turned to glare at Joe when he came toward them.
Joe smiled at McGill.
“I know how Wi-Fi works, Pissant,” McGill snapped. “But why didn’t they install it next to the server instead of way the hell over here?”
Catalina took a 32 gig memory chip that came with the instruction manual and plugged it into a slot on her iPad. “That’s something you’ll have to take up with Tracy.” She flipped a page in the manual.
By 5 p.m., she’d installed the nylon filament roll that came with the printer and was ready to print the sample image from the memory chip.
As the printer hummed and nylon filament was pulled into the print head, a bright red object began to form.
Several pissants and two drones came to watch as layer upon layer built up on the bed of the printer.
“What is that?” someone asked.
Catalina shrugged as she watched.
“Some sort of statue?” another pissant asked.
“Maybe.”
“It’s a chess piece,” Joe said.
Catalina smiled.
“A knight.”
“Yeah,” McGill said. “A knight.”
It took only five minutes to produce the three-inch tall knight.
Catalina cut it free from the printer bed, examined it, then handed it to Joe.
“Nice.” Joe passed it to McGill.
“The edges are rough,” McGill said.
“So?” Journey Covey, the Black woman who’d told Catalina to get out of the cubicle, took the knight from McGill. “Five minutes ago, it was just a coil of red nylon string.”
“Can a Three-D printer print a Three-D printer?” Joe asked.
Everyone stared at him.
“Probably the outside parts,” Catalina said. “But not the internal structure, or the electronics and coding.”
“You could print all the parts,” Journey said. “But you’d have to code the programming.” She passed to knight to another drone.
“What are you going to print next, Catalina?” Joe asked.
Using her phone, she clicked a photo of him. “Your hand.”
It was almost midnight when the last pissant left the building. All the drones and monarchs had left hours before.
Catalina went to the storeroom and took a spray bottle of Windex, along with a roll of paper towels.
She opened a back window and stepped out onto the fire escape.
After glancing around, she went up the metal stairs to the roof, then made her way along the parapet in the dark until she came to the skylight above her desk.
She looked down at her workspace for a moment, then at the bullpen and rows of cubicles.
It took a lot of Windex, and a half-roll of paper towels, but she finally cleaned away the years’ accumulation of crud, leaving the glass sparkling in the moonlight.
The next morning at sunrise, she was back at her desk. The glow from above, cast her work area in a warm, yellow radiance. Turning in her chair, she saw the bright sunlight painting the far wall in golden orange while filling the whole place with beautiful natural light.
Just before seven, McGill came in and glanced about, smiling. When he saw Catalina watching him, he frowned. She duplicated his ugly grimace.
The brightened work area seemed to cheer everyone else as they came in, even old man Edison.
“When did they clean your skylight?” Joe brought his coffee and a spare chair to her desk.
“I have no idea.” She grinned. “It was like that when I got here.”
“You know…” He sipped his coffee. “That cleaning guy could have slipped and fell off the roof in the dark.”
“Or he could have fallen through the skylight.”
“Yeah, that would’ve made a mess on your desk.”
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