The Girl Who Sat in the Corner

Chapter 11 - Work

                   

As he looked out, he could see the haze along the base of the Santa Cruz mountains to the south while the last fringes of pearly white fog were overflowing the coastal mountains to the west. Though it wasn't yet 2:30, the traffic on 280 just outside of his office window was beginning to bog down. Earlier and earlier, the thought. In a lot of ways, he was lucky. Nearly everyone in Silicon Valley were sunlight-deprived cubicle dwellers. Four years at Stanford and another three at Cal Tech bought him a window seat at a small but prestigious consultancy. He was good and it paid the bills, which got pretty high in this part of the world. On a shelf above his desk sat a blue baseball cap bearing the NASA logo, beneath which were the embroidered words, "Yes, it is Rocket Science!" A gift from his latest client. The work was interesting enough to get him out of bed from day to day and, having developed some skill in hiding the fears and near-constant depression that plagued him, he was surviving.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. It was Preetha. "Hey, what's up Pree?"

Preetha was his only female friend. Actually, she was about his only friend here in Silicon Valley. She was smart, funny, and totally gay, so it made for a friendship he felt safe in.  In fact, when her conservative-minded parents came to visit from India, she presented him as something of a boyfriend. They were polite enough to hide their outrage at his being white, but it staved off more uncomfortable questions about their daughter being twenty-eight and still single.

She was also an expert dynamic logic designer, one of the people who designed the computer chips. She knew how to tease electrons though the billions of silicon gates in the complex processors that made just about everything "smart." What she did was a mystery to him.  He knew just enough about her world to understand how much more complicated it was than his. It also kept them from talking shop while they were together and they both appreciated that.

"They're done," she said. He loved her reedy voice and lilting accent. "Can I come by tonight?"

"Sure. Want to grab some dinner first?" With the custom chips in hand, Wesley wanted to start running his tests as soon as he could but, of course, wanted to be polite.

"Can't tonight. I'm seeing Jenny a little later." He felt happy for her budding romance, but also a little sad that the two of them were spending less and less time together now. "I'll come by after traffic." That unit of timekeeping had become almost universal throughout the commute-strangled San Francisco Bay Area.

They said their goodbyes and he turned back to his computer feeling a bit encouraged and yet a little fearful. The secret project that had kept him going for the past fifteen years would soon be at its conclusion.

Though the memory of that day in the bus had become less painful, it had settled down to a dull ache that stayed with him and weighed on him over the years. What kept him going wasn't so much the project, but a series of little discoveries he made that all seemed to keep pointing in the same mysterious direction. He had never lost his interest in physics and the idea of multiple universes, nor the idea that there had to be a way of building a virtual bridge with nothing more than software and the right kind of network. He barely realized it, but each time one of his experiments succeeded, the ache briefly left him.

Letting himself get engrossed in his work, the rest of the afternoon passed quickly. His traffic app told him that the Lawrence Expressway was packed as usual, so he zig-zagged north on some less crowded surface streets to his apartment in Sunnyvale.

His salary let him afford another local luxury, the ability to live by himself. The one-bedroom condo in an old complex just off Mathilda Ave. wasn't much to look at, but it suited his purposes and gave him an easy commute. As he walked up the concrete steps, the iron railings thrummed with each step, telling him that he was home. It comforted him. At times it was lonely, but the privacy being able to close his own the door on the world gave him a sense of peace and security.