Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter 12: Portrait Mode

Ultimately, they split duties up simply. The trio of scientists gathered around the Prism, safe in its tiny test tube, and began planning how to safely get it out. A terrarium was produced from the detritus of Em's garage, and Em scrubbed it down while Dyson and Hawk stood heads together, a pane of glass and a cutter between them. From what Alex could hear, they were planning how best to make a clean box using rubber gloves and commercial grade acrylic cement.

Alex let the scientists do the incomprehensible things. His wife would have the other two well in hand. He turned his attention to the human element: Edgar Studdard.

A quick computer search gave Alex the more useless basics. Birthplace: Idaho panhandle—he winced, as the last trip he and Hawk made through that part of the world ended with someone calling Hawk an N-word-with-hard-R, largely because they were not allowed to shoot her—where he stayed until his parents sent him to Standford, for business. He graduated solidly middle of pack, both in his class and among his own siblings. When you number a brain surgeon, a nuclear physicist and a Poet Laureate among your close family, a simple Masters in business isn't very impressive.

Now, that fact wasn't bloodless. It was the first step towards a picture Alex wanted to build. Not who Studdard was according to his wiki article and his bio in Forbes, but who he was as a person. Who was the sort of man who could so knowingly end the world?

He turned to Facebook. Studdard did not have one. Kaiser Willheim did. And Willheim dutifully tagged his friend in each photograph they shared, as he did each employee, and half of the general public he posed with. In every photo Kaiser was the man Alex had met—a charming chameleon who lied not just with his voice but his entire person, quite the impressive feat—and each individual looked thrilled to be there...save for Studdard.

Sour would describe the man thus depicted. He had white hair, and a lot of it, in the thick perfection created by hair plugs. His face was lined like old leather, despite being paler than the flesh of an apple. The cigarillo that was his constant companion was something of an explanation, though in ten years of photographs, Alex never once saw it lit. Ex-smoker, he thought. Willing to give up the smoke, but not the oral fixation. That was another useful thing to see. It could be a desperation, or a grasp at poisoned comfort, but Alex didn't think so. Alex thought it was the grasping clutch of a miser, paring each penny to the rind because Studdard could not stand to let go. The cigarillos and occasional cigar were both luxury brands, pricy hand-rolled numbers that mostly live in humidors. They were a display of status, and a thing of habit. Every ex-smoker remembers their ritual well, like an atheist recalling catechism, a husband remembering an adulterous wife. Studdard looked like the sort of man who would cling to habits as he clung to gold, for the simply reason that change first requires one to admit that they were wrong.

The clothes were another thing. They were the sort of dude-ranch western wear that put Alex's teeth on edge...but it was not an affectation. Kaiser, dressed in flannel, that had been pure show. Studdard did not ever appear as anything less than a cowboy, as imagined by a northerner. He had little metal clips on the corners of his collar, a string-tie carefully nestled above the topmost button of his shirt. He wore cowboy boots unviolated by scuff or wrinkle, a patent-leather shine that gave a come-hither to every particle of dirt for the next square mile. A rich man who wants to be a cowboy is nothing to be ashamed of...unless that rich man is unable to trade his dreams of horses and native raids to the cool reality of working men and darker undertones of genocide. This cowboy garb was too bloodless to be real; it was all about Studdard's ideas, and his pride.

He took a moment to talk to Henry Dyson, while Hawk and Em ran a diamond-tipped cutter across the aquarium glass. Despite saying his nickname was "Beria", Dyson's account of Studdard was positive, nearly reverential. And yet the hatred and fear of the man bled through Dyson's words like arterial spray. It was like watching someone recite their catechism, in a way. Studdard's kindness was a prayer learned by rote, the list of his notions of Charity (it took a while for Dyson to work through it all; the man never met a cancer cause he couldn't support) an Advent, his kindness a list of apostles hastily learned and just as swiftly forgotten. But the reality, the true theology of this interpersonal relationship, came through in Dyson's reactions. A grimace here, a shudder of fear, a tightening of eye and fist. Gods are born in liminal space, the places between word and deed and thought. The fear of this corporate deity lurked through every word. His nickname in the Ararat Project was "Beria."