MOAB

Chapter 3: Galene @ 0.6x nhs

Chapter 3: Galene @ 0.6x nhs

The elevator dinged, and the doors slid open. This was the first time Galene ever stepped foot into the penthouse. There was no particular reason for that, the boss just assigned the IT crowd into the same floors so that they’d get familiar with the quirks of the system in each office and the equivalent fleshware problems.

There was a clear air of privilege up here. There was a reception area with expensive leather couches, doors that were sleek but secure, electronics integrated into the design of the place. Galene had seen the offices of top executives in the corp, this was similar to those but certainly a step above them.

Someone spoke, and Galene yelped. “Oh em gee, you scared the crap out of me!”

The woman smiled softly. “Hello, Galene. Sorry for sneaking up on you. It must be the carpet, walking is so silent on it. I will make sure to cough next time.”

Galene tugged her laptop bag nervously. “Yeah. Thick carpets.” Had she seen that woman somewhere before? The woman’s resting face seemed weird, somehow. Her make-up or something. Her open mouth. It was like, a mask? No, a Greek tragedy mask! That’s it!

Weird.

“How rude of me, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Melpomene. Nice to meet you.” She gave her hand.

Galene shook it. “So, you called for a computer problem?”

“Right this way. Follow me, please.”

Melpomene used her keycard, and they got further inside. Galene couldn’t see it all, but from guessing the layout she saw that the penthouse occupied the entire floor. That was weird, because she had been used to the floor layout in the rest of the skyscraper, and it was a familiar set of big floor spaces for the employees with corner offices for the managers. This was made differently.

The decoration was modern and seemed expensive. They got into the flat itself, which showed more lived-in than the lobby. It wasn’t messy per se, again, Galene wouldn’t dare accuse anyone of being a slob, but there were clear signs of someone living here permanently.

A man, to be precise.

“Please wait here for a moment,” Melpomene said and stepped into the next room.

Galene mumbled back and looked around. There were lots of cool stuff here. Nerdy gadgets littered the place. Oh, cool! A lightsaber toy. Neat. She looked around the shelves, there were bookcases practically on every wall. There were rows and rows of books, but some bookcases had only stacks of solid state hard drives. Their labels had the contents on them, and they were old TV shows, full seasons of Netflix series, movies. One entire bookcase had book titles.

Wait, two-hundred book titles per SSD? That wasn’t right, you could fit millions of books in each of the drives.

Galene bit her lip and touched the lightsaber. She grabbed it, and it made the familiar wooshing sound. It was too loud and Galene winced. She was about to put it back, but was distracted.

Over the corridor, she could hear Melpomene talk to a man.

Wait.

Her voice was funny. Weird, somehow. “ObviouslytheysentherbecauseGeorgewasn’tavailable.”

Was she speaking faster?

The man replied something.

“Wantmetocheckwiththedepartmenthead?”

Holy s**t! She was speaking faster.

The man sighed? Something like that. “Doessheevenknowwhatshe’sdoing?”

What a douche!

“Herclearancelevelchecksout,ifthat’swhatyou’reworried.”

“Fine.Bringherin.”

Galene fumbled with the lightsaber, and she dropped it on the floor.

Melpomene came back, glanced at her while she placed the prop back and smiled. “Follow me next door, if you please.”

“Ahem. Sure.” Galene followed.

The man was in his forties. To Galene’s eyes, he looked old. Handsome, but old. He had greying sideburns, that detail that made a man super hot for a few years in his lifetime, as if Nature was giving him one last chance to spread his genes before taking away his erection.

“Hello. Well, the problem is… I don’t really know what it is, George had isolated something… Call me Greg, for short,” he spat out in nonlinear conversation and presented his hand.

Galene shook it. “Hello. I’m Galene. Call me Gal, for short.”

“Short is good.”

She chuckled, “You’re not referring to our height difference, are you?” She was average to short for a woman, and he was 1.80 metres, so he had a good head over her.

“Hah! No, I was talking about swiftness.” He checked his watch. Not a smartwatch, an actual old-timey digital watch, with buttons and sports thingies on it. Weird. “Well, I’m about to have a phone call, please carry on with your computer troubleshooting.” He pointed at one of the towers in his workstation. He had an enormous set-up, not unusual for analysts, with four splayed out monitors, two towers with separate mechanical keyboards, headphones, surround sound (not holosound, which was again, weird), and a dedicated optic fibre line to one of Hermes’ AIs. That last one Gal knew, because she had worked on the other end, while fixing problems with her colleague George.

On the screen was a video feed, frozen, with generated subtitles underneath. The program showed a ‘3.0x’ at the corner.

Gal shrugged and threw her laptop bag on the desk. She crawled underneath the desk and accessed the computer tower. It was funny how nobody told you how much crawling underneath desks an IT worker had to do. It should have been right in the job description: Information Technology, Desk Crawling.

Oh well, at least this place was clean.

Greg spoke on the phone at the next room, while Mel hovered around. “Greg mentioned issues with video playback, how they’d be slow to load sometimes.”

“Okay, let’s see.” Gal checked out the classic issues of troubleshooting, loose cables, a reset of the computer, unplug peripherals. Then she sat on the desk-chair and loaded up some videos. They seemed fine, no dropped frames, no artefacts on the image. She fed the sound into the headset so as not to make noise and listened. The audio was fine, in time with the video.

If you ignored the fact that everything was played back at 3x times the normal speed, it all worked okay. How could anyone follow that? “I don’t see what the problem is.”

“Well, there is a five-second delay when switching between the feeds.”

Gal nodded slowly, pursing her lips. “Five whole seconds? Well, we certainly can’t have that!” Be calm, Gal. Now you know why the boss sent ya.

“Excellent,” Mel said and left her to work alone.

Gal sighed and slowly clicked around the settings. She tweaked some of the video program’s settings so it utilised more of the processor, ran some tests and managed to drop the delay when switching down to 1 second.

Her work practically done, she let the video running and tried to keep up, watching it with all the focus she could muster. It was some newsfeed about natural gas zones south of Cyprus. Gal checked around to see that nobody was watching and squinted her eyes to fight, to manage to keep up with the information running at that speed. She actually tried, she grabbed the ends of the desk as if she was about to leap forward in a race, she fixed her eyes on the screen, she shooed away all thoughts from her mind. She really tried to read the subtitles, match words to their meaning, but the letters simply flashed too fast for her to read, let alone comprehend.

Un. f*****g. Believable.

How could anybody watch something this accelerated?

It couldn’t be done. She stopped herself before she popped a vein on her forehead or something or something more important like her clicking finger.

Greg came back into the room, ending the phone conversation. “Right, Dan. We need to end this phone call now, think about any issues you want to discuss next time and send them to me in an email. Nope, that was my allotted time for this phone call. Yes, really. Goodbye.”

Gal raised an eyebrow. Had he just blown off an associate? Handsome and cheeky. Still weird, though.

“So, can something be done for the lag?” he asked her.

“Yes, I fixed some settings, should be down to a single second.” She paused, hovering her finger over the spacebar. “Or is that not acceptable?”

He chuckled. “It’s fine. Show me.”

She started a few video feeds, and the delay was around one second every time.

“Perfect,” he clapped his hands together, shifting his attention to his papers. Papers! Who had papers anymore, other than the government?

Feeling dismissed, Gal stood up and threw her laptop bag over her shoulder. She hesitated. “Um…”

“Yes?” His eyes scanned the documents, flitting fast across the page. He held a pen to guide his attention on each line.

“I noticed that you have these video feeds with generated subtitles. Which are accelerated at three times normal speed, for some reason.”

“Yes.”

“So, I think it would be easier to actually read the subtitles if there was a delay on the screen, and a stacking of the new ones underneath.” Why was she suggesting stuff? Hadn’t she learnt from her year in corporate life that he who suggesteth, was suckereth into worketh?

He raised his eyes, finally giving her his attention. “Really?” He thought about it. “Yes, I think that might be easier to read. Show me.”

She sat back down on his desk-chair and he leaned over her. Why was she blushing, dammit? And had she showered that morning? She must have, right? She shook her head and focused on computers. She opened a developer’s kit for the video program and quickly threw together a script that would echo the auto-generated subtitles for a few seconds longer on the screen, and append the new ones underneath. That took her a couple of minutes, during which time she tried really hard to ignore the man leaning over her. She ran the script and tested it.

The video feed played back at 3 times normal speed, and the subtitles stayed on the screen longer. For a second she tried to keep up with the information flow like before, but gave up. She glanced at Greg, looming over her.

He focused for a minute, then leaned forward to hit a keyboard shortcut. He smelled fresh and manly. He increased the speed to 3.1x, then 3.2x, then 3.3x. He left it there for a few minutes, watching the experts talking about natural gas. Then he increased the speed to 3.4x, then jumped ahead to 4.0x. He watched for a minute, the words and the information blurring in front of her. He lowered the speed down to 3.3x.

He watched for a few more seconds and then nodded. “That’s brilliant. A 10% increase. Who did you say you were, again?”