Introduction

Daniel loved the early morning hours. Most of the world was still asleep, leaving empty streets and coffee shops ripe for thinking, relaxing, expanding.

On an unseasonably warm October morning such as it was, the Missouri humidity was slipping into memory and autumn seemed impossibly far away. He was walking along one side of the park, halfway between the office and his parking garage. Here he might slow his stride to enjoy the manicured lawns that swept up to the brick facades of the Red Campus and the quad beyond.

Somewhere nearby, it was rumored that a rooster had staked a claim on a particularly attractive cluster of shrubbery. Daniel hoped the poor creature didn’t end up being captured by a roving herd of students. Then the overgrown hedges and sprawling crabapple trees blocked his view and it was time to continue the push to work. The coffee shop would open in eight minutes.

Rounding the corner of the Journalism Building, he caught the first glimpses of 615 Locust, the place that consumed so much of his life force. The miasma seemed to suck at him even from this distance.

It was gargantuan by comparison to other buildings on campus. Seven stories of limestone pushed their way into the sky, blushing pink in the early morning light. Built in the eighties as a high-end medical facility to treat affluent Baby Boomers, it had been intended as the crown jewel of the Collegium’s medical program. When the recession hit, design of the building had been turned over to the Architectural Engineering Department at the Collegium’s affiliate university in Rolla. The resulting building was so uninspired that the College of Design at the Collegium proper was called in to provide fitting grandeur.

It took three years of squabbling between architects, structural engineers, designers, and accountants—by then the recession had begun to eat into the construction budget—to bring the project to a close. Within five years, the building was abandoned in favor of a new, high-tech medical park that became known as the Transparent Campus due to all of the gleaming glass structures therein.

During this same time, computers and the Internet were coming into greater popularity. It was decided that Collegium proper and its affiliate universities needed a central place to collect and organize the strange people who made the computers work. The Collegium administration, not wanting to let good space go to waste, created the Division of Information Technology and placed the motley group in the abandoned medical building to work their dark arts.

The entrance to 615 Locust was flanked by angels, wings meeting to form an arch above the automatic doors. Serpents had been added as a modern interpretation of the caduceus. Intended to be edgy and thought provoking, the result was vaguely pornographic. To Daniel, the angels seemed sad and embarrassed by the indignity of their role in the scene.

Once inside, Daniel ignored the renovation activities in the courtyard area. A quick glance at the fountain clock told him he was not going to be standing outside the coffee shop when it opened. Two days in a row. Shit.

It seemed to him that programmers had one of two disorders. Either they had varying degrees of obsessiveness, or they lacked the ability to manage clutter or hygiene. The former, he decided, was a result of breaking the world into exacting structures that could be understood by the computers. The latter did not seem to be an occupational hazard. Rather, it seemed that the practical nature of most programmers allowed them to tolerate many idiosyncrasies in their peers as long as those quirks didn’t interfere with the digital world.

Daniel suffered from a certain amount of obsessiveness with regard to time, deadlines, and processes. Missing his self-imposed coffee timetable could unhinge the whole day. As he darted for the door to the Dungeon, he could feel the hinges of his world going askew.

He almost ran down the two flights of stairs to the first subbasement, known to its inhabitants as the Dungeon. Here he went past partitions upholstered in fabric of an institutional hue that might be generously referred to as taupe. His cubicle was at the start of the maze, third from the door. Laptop, lunch, and snacks were piled on a dusty stack of papers. If he really pushed himself, he would only lose five minutes of coffee time.

It was going to be a long day.