And it was this detail that finally afforded Ben and C-plus a bit of privacy in which to have a real conversation. For an inner layer of even higher security surrounded the chamber housing the Logic Mill. Casual museum strollers could view it at a distance through a heavy glass window, but if you actually wanted to go in and see the thing working you had to check your bag and your coat and go through a metal detector and a pat-down. And that was enough of a barrier that most visitors were content just to look at it through the glass. Ben and Corvallis, however, went through and found themselves alone in a sunken vault (they sealed it up at night) with a contraption that slowly but inexorably shuffled gold plates around and probed them with metal pins.

“It’s on the Internet!” Ben said, indicating a flat-panel screen suspended on a jointed arm. Lines of text were marching up it so slowly that the display appeared to be frozen most of the time. Corvallis recognized them as low-level Internet codes.

“Of course it is,” he said numbly.

“In their retirement some of the OG Epiphyte geeks figured out how to program the Logic Mill to speak TCP, and gave it its own IP address—you can ping it if you have a lot of time on your hands.”

They stood there for a minute or two, watching the Logic Mill work, deriving a kind of calm satisfaction from the way the metal prods engaged the cards. When it seemed the time was right, C-plus said: “So. Elmo Shepherd.”

“El’s a true believer,” Ben replied.

Ben was in a T-shirt: swag from an early release of T’Rain, well worn in, with a dime-sized moth hole above his right nipple. Corvallis did not have to ask to understand that Ben had made a conscious choice to put it on this morning as a way of remembering Richard Forthrast, who’d given Ben his first job after Ben had been thrown out of Princeton. Ben had a round face, curly brown hair, hadn’t shaved in a while.

“You’ve met El?”

“Sat in on a bunch of meetings with him.”

“Why?”

“A couple of years ago he was hanging around here, trying to make something happen between us and ELSH. Once it got past the flirting stage, the powers that be here at WABSI realized they needed a programmer in the room, just to make sense of what he was proposing.”

“That surprises me a little,” Corvallis said. “I thought El was all about stuff like ion-beam scanning. The connectome. How to collect the data, how to store it in the cloud.”

“Stuff that’s not my department, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, he’s looking beyond that,” Ben said, and took a swig of his flat white. “In a way, that’s the part of it he’s least comfortable with, right?”

“Because he’s a bit-basher.”