6
Now began delightful days. Quinn soon settled into a routine of getting up around nine and eating breakfast alone in the dining hall. Then he’d take his second cup of coffee into the lab, where Omar, Hamada, and Boutros would already be at work. For the first two weeks in the palace, he helped them with projects already in progress: a tiny robot that could scamper on wire legs but that tended to waltz into walls, a listening device embedded in a pencil eraser, an algorithm that could evaluate possible movements of a dispersing crowd in a confined space.
At Orbotica he’d been a cog deep within a gigantic machine. There had always been a mountain of paperwork to fill out, and they had to be wary of patents and codes and company directives. Each step had been vetted by a bevy of lawyers.
