Heterogeneous World - Chapter 2
2
The small man crashed through the doors of the lab, face red and eyes bulging, mumbling imprecations as he marched towards the stairs. Dr. Langston Moeller was headed to the Human Resources office three floors below to inform them of the egregious mistake they had made in passing him over for promotion. His bald head was red as he skipped down the stairs two or three at a time already playing out the conversation in his head.
“I’ve been at the Institute for seven years, I’ve been a loyal employee, and my PhD is actually in Physics, not applied mathematics.” he said, the conversation bursting from his thoughts into the real world. “Furthermore, the quality of my work in radio wave transmissions far surpasses my so-called colleagues…and I graduated cum laude from Berkeley.”
By the time the Doctor reached the first floor he had sweat through his tweed jacket, which was a size too small for his plump frame. Out of breath and still red in the face, he barged into the office without knocking and began his tirade. A few moments later, he reappeared in the hallway quieter but still grumbling angrily under his breath. The visit had not gone his way despite the logic of his arguments. Instead he had been quickly silenced by the HR director, Marge Hammersmith, and threatened with a write-up if he did not leave immediately, which he did.
Moeller had been passed over for his bid to take over the research project he had been working on for the last two years. His boss had recently been forced to retire and it had been his turn to take the helm. Despite this, someone in the department had chosen a man many years his junior to get the job that, by all measures, should have been his. So much for loyalty, he thought. Every time I try to advance, HR is one step ahead of me, cutting my legs out from under me in one way or another.
The Doctor made his way back up to the second floor cafeteria to give himself time to cool off before returning to the lab. After pouring himself a cup of coffee and grabbing a cheese danish, he moved up to the cashier to pay. The lumpy, disheveled woman at the cash register was reading a vampire romance novel and did not notice him as he approached. Am I the only professional in the building? he wondered. It doesn’t matter what you do, do it with pride—especially if you do something as inconsequential as being a cashier at a government laboratory. He stood for a moment, waiting for the woman to come out of her trance and ring him up. When, after almost thirty seconds, she had still not noticed him, he began to tap one of the quarters in his hand on the metal counter. Still unable to get her attention, his blood pressure began to rise again. He feigned a cough, but even this did not evoke a reaction.
“Excuse me, I don’t want to interrupt your important reading. What are you working on Dostoevsky?” he said with a wry smile.
The woman lowered her book and lifted her head slowly, shooting a cold look at the Doctor. Moeller, not about to be intimidated by a minimum wage cashier, kept his gaze fixed on her. His eyes vibrated with anger while the heat under his clothes rose, making him feel as though the pressure from the steam build up would burst his collar wide open. Without moving his head, he began to slowly tap the quarter again, trying his best to antagonize the old cashier.
“Who’s your manager?” he asked, finally breaking the stare down.
“Daa-stoy-ev-skee,” the woman said in a thick Russian accent.
“What?” Moeller said, confused.
“You say Daa-stee-ef-skee. This is wrong,” she said.
“How dare you correct me,” he said with an exhale, unable to believe that she was challenging him.
“You say it wrong, I correct you,” the woman explained coolly. “Two dollars fifty cent.”
Moeller fished around in his pocket for the extra quarter he was missing. Once he found it, he dropped the money onto the counter, grabbed his coffee and danish, and left.
Back up in the Lab the Doctor sat at his station and brooded, unable to drop either the HR or cafeteria incidents from his mind. Around him two of the three other scientists on the project worked away at the communal table in the middle of the room. The two men had disassembled the small encryption module and were fiddling with it under the light of a bright lamp.
“Listen you two, be careful with that module. You broke the damn thing last week and I don’t want to have to re-solder the connections again,” Moeller said.
The two men looked at one another and shook their heads. “We’re not going to break your toy, Langston. Anyway, it’s not that complicated. It’s not like it’s Quantum Physics,” one of the men said.
The two men broke out in laughter, then turned back to what they had been doing.
“Ten dollars I’ll end up having to fix it again—morons,” Moeller said under his breath.
“What was that, Langston?” the other man asked, a mocking grin on his face.
“Listen for God’s sake! The program is to develop a radio system, not to identify new particles in an accelerator,” the Doctor said, narrowing his eyes and pointing his finger at the men. “You focus on your quantum entanglement crap and just, well, leave the radio to me.”
“Calm yourself, Langston. We’ll be ready for testing next week,” the man said, rolling his eyes.
“Yea, yea, promises, promises. When I actually see your instantaneous data transfer, then you can brag,” Moeller said. “And don’t forget, you’ve also got to build the quantum repeaters or this thing won’t be worth the metal it’s made of.”
The man waved his hand as if batting away the Doctor’s words.
“Last I checked, my radio was already working. Your promises and two quarters won’t buy me a cup of coffee.”
Moeller had, in fact, designed and built the main chassis of the system, which represented over ninety percent of the total work. On this fact alone he believed he should be leading the project, but it was not to be. The promotion papers had been pushed through and approved before he had even found out about them. Spurious at best, he thought. It was an obvious attempt to preempt his ability to file a formal complaint that had any chance of success. He snorted and returned to his danish.
Within the hour, Moeller sat fiddling with the encryption module that the others had broken again while three quantum scientists, clustered around a large whiteboard on the opposite end of the room, pretended that nothing was wrong. Why these sub-atomic charlatans are esteemed over me is beyond understanding, he thought. They always have their head in the clouds, postulating hypotheses that sound more like sci-fi than science…and they’re incapable of performing even the most basic engineering tasks.
It was true that the components they had proposed were impressive, but the device still needed the same standard radio components and engineering that existed in every other military communications system, and this was where Moeller stood out. As far as he was concerned, he was the world’s leading expert on these topics, having been involved with every aspect of signal analysis and communications throughout his uncredited career. As he ruminated, the door to the lab swung open, changing the air pressure in the room. In strutted a tall, swarthy man with a head full of curly black hair, Gilberto Suárez. Moeller grimaced.
If the Doctor had been a super hero, Gilberto would have been his arch enemy. Moeller quickly looked back down at the soldering iron and circuit board in an effort to avoid eye contact with the repugnant man.
“¡Hola Gil!” the men around the whiteboard chirped.
“Hola mi gente. ¿como están?” Gil replied in his smooth latin accent.
“Muy bien,” the three men replied, sounding like first year Spanish students.
“Estimado Moeller, how’s it going?” Gil said, turning to the Doctor.
Ignoring the man, the Doctor continued to stare at the connections he was soldering. The two men had history. Gil was the head of a new program studying a series of complex radio transmissions that had recently been discovered coming from an area near the distant star Albemuth—this was the problem. Moeller was an avid ham operator and did radio astronomy as an avocation. He had been the first to identify the strange signals that Gil had taken credit for and suspected that someone had leaked his findings to the man.
Moeller had still been in the process of writing his paper on the discovery when Gil unexpectedly published a paper on the same phenomenon. It was odd that a scientist who had no background in radio astronomy and no access to the kind of equipment required could have managed to publish before him, and he had his suspicions on who the mole might be. The Doctor had read the hastily written paper Gil had published and believed he had thrown it together specifically to subvert the Doctor’s ability to benefit from the find.
Regardless of where he had gotten the information, the discovery had earned Suárez his own program, much to Moeller’s chagrin. Having your own research grant was the pinnacle of success, at least in the world they lived in. Program Directors lived a dynamic life, speaking at conferences, getting recognition from their colleagues, and leading large teams of researchers. The way he saw it, Gil had stolen that from him.
“You look lost in your thoughts, Langston,” the man said to him. “Anything I can help with?”
Moeller looked up at the man and said nothing. He did his best to hide the disdain that he felt for Suárez, though it was difficult. Langston Moeller believed in logic over emotions, but this particular man always struck a nerve deep down in the core of who he was and he struggled to maintain his composure.
“Oh come now, you aren’t still mad about Albemuth, are you?” Gil said. “Listen, your research has been invaluable to our work. I wish you’d reconsider coming over and working for me.”
Moeller heard the schoolgirl giggling coming from the men behind him, but keeping his cool, returned to his work. Gil remained looking over his shoulder as he worked on the final welds he needed to complete.
“Go away, Gil,” he said flatly.
“Alright, alright,” Gil said, patting him on the shoulder. “Listen, say hello to your lovely wife Lilly for me, okay?”
As Suárez began to walk away, the Doctor looked up and said, “That reminds me, Gil. I did, in fact, record some very interesting spectroscopy, but I’m sure your team’s already seen it…”
Although Gil’s eyes sparkled with interest, he knew he would be too proud to ask Moeller for his data. “Oh…yes, yes. The boys did mention something to that effect,” he said, a thin smile creeping onto his face. “But, I’ll let you know if not.”
The trap had been set.
The Doctor set down the circuit board, finished with his repairs, and began to pack up his things. Suárez had moved down to the group of men at the other end of the room and was talking loudly with them. They laughed and slapped one another on the back. How performative, he thought, shaking his head. Once done packing his belongings, he casually walked out of the lab. Say hi to your lovely wife? What a scoundrel that man was.
Once out of the building, Moeller sat in his car with his eyes closed, breathing slowly in an effort to quiet his mind. He had worked hard his whole career to get ahead, to provide for his mentally ill wife, and to make a name for himself. He was a man of science, precise and logical; there was no place for emotional looseness in his world. On the whole he was restrained and practical, but today he had let the situation get the better of him. He knew he had been the best choice for the promotion and had been caught off guard when he had learned about the coup.
Gil had known about the slight before it had happened and Moeller suspected that he had a hand in it. Gil was charismatic, a quality that the Doctor lacked, perhaps even shunned. He wanted to be known for his work, not for weaseling his way up the ladder of success like the silver-tongued Suárez, whose advancement was directly correlated to the man’s proximity to influential board members. The Doctor was certain that the man was jealous of his intellect for he was lacking in that quality himself. Gil was a second-rate hack, a jack of few trades and terrible at all of them. Moeller caught himself ruminating and stopped himself. Refocusing his mind, he took a few more deep breaths and started the car.
He always enjoyed his drive home. It was his sanctuary, peaceful and quiet, when he could remove all of his masks and allow Doctor Moeller to become Langston for a small window of time. Over the last two weeks he had been devising his plan for retribution against whomever had stolen his discovery and was ready to act. His wife, Lilly, would be out at her writer’s group tonight, giving him enough time to prepare the house and put his plan into action. Soon he would catch the thieves in action. He smiled, pleased with himself and his devious scheme.
Conceiving and coordinating complex experiments was one of the skills that had kept him employed at the Institute even after he had gotten on the wrong side of the board. He had enjoyed architecting this one especially since it included all of the things he was good at, wireless communications, intelligence collection, and spying.
Twenty years prior, when he had been Captain Langston Moeller USMC, his MOS had been 0206—Signals Intelligence. Once out of the military and done with his graduate degrees, he had parlayed his top-secret SCI clearance into a job developing advanced communications technology, but had never lost his love of listening in on other people’s conversations. Now he had devised the ultimate op that would root out the traitor and soon he would know where the leak in his otherwise hermetic life had sprung.
Smiling, he turned on the radio and rolled through the stations until he found something worth listening to. It did not take long for him to find what he wanted. Turning up the volume, he sat back, winding through back roads on his way home, letting Wagner’s Tannhäuser wash over him like the waves of the sea.
By the time he arrived home his wife was already gone. She had left a note on the refrigerator letting him know that there were frozen meals and that he should remember to eat something. He growled, frustrated at her laziness.
“The woman does nothing all day except doodle and make up terrible poems,” he said. “What a fatuous existence.”
Moeller did not let this aggravate him—he had work to do. Walking into the garage he pulled out the boxes of gear he had been gathering, piece by piece, over the last few weeks and carried them into the house. He had already hung dozens of pinhole cameras and microphones, arranged for maximum coverage. Now all that was left was to pull them all into the mixer and then into his custom built receiver system. Down in the basement he began to connect the devices into the wireless bridge, testing each as he went. He had paid extra for high quality gear and was happy that he did when he saw there were no component failures.
He stopped after an hour to throw a frozen burrito in the microwave, then began again. All was going well. The traffic routed perfectly into the hardware and connected seamlessly with the custom components he had built to ensure the cameras and microphones would follow activity around the house if necessary. Once he confirmed that everything was up and running internally, Moeller connected the system up to the cloud infrastructure that hosted his custom monitoring application. This application, also built from scratch, allowed him full control of all of the devices in the house. After conducting a full system test, walking around the whole house reciting his favorite William Blake poems, he watched the event playback and was pleased at both the performance and quality of the recordings.
When he heard the notification that a car had pulled into the driveway, he quickly put his gear away and ran upstairs. It would have taken professional audio-visual installers weeks to simply install a system like this, but he had been able to design, build, and deploy the whole thing in less than a month. The Doctor quickly grabbed his cold burrito out of the microwave and sat down in his reading chair, trying his best to seem casual.
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