Before I sit down behind his desk, I scan the walls, floor, and ceiling up and down with the NecronomiPod. Sure enough, certain of the file drawers are booby-trapped with lethal-looking webworks of magic—not drawn in the plodding journeyman hand of the outer door's vandal, but sketched in Angleton's spidery scrawl, complex arcs and symbols linking arcane declarations and gruesome probability matrices. I could reverse engineer them in time and maybe worm my way inside, but knowing the boss there's probably nothing there but nitrogen triiodide on the drawer rails and a jack-in-the-box loaded with tear gas: he was a firm believer in keeping the crown jewels in his head—or its annex, the thing in the green metal desk.

The Memex . . .

You've got to understand that although I've read about the things, I've never actually used one. It's an important piece of the history of computing, leaked to the public as a think-piece commissioned by the Atlantic Weekly in 1945; most of the readers thought it was a gosh-wow-by-damn good idea, but were unlikely to realize that a number of the things had actually been built, using a slush fund earmarked for the Manhattan Project. The product of electromechanical engineering at its finest, not to mention its most horrendously complex, each Memex cost as much as a B-29 bomber—and contained six times as many moving parts, most of them assembled by watchmakers. It wasn't until HyperCard showed up on the Apple Mac in 1987 that anything like it reached the general public.

I believe Angleton's Memex is the only one that is still working, much less in day-to-day use, and to say it takes black magic to keep it running would be no exaggeration. I approach the seat with considerable caution, and not just because I'm absolutely certain he will have taken steps to ensure that anyone who sits in it without his approval and pushes the big red on button will never push another button in their (admittedly short) life; he knows how to use the thing, but if I crash it or break the cylinder head gasket or something and he comes back, the only shoes I'd be safe in would be a pair of NASA-issue moon boots (and maybe not even then).