45. Relay Race

So that’s what they did. Mateo saw Turing in the distance a few times, so that was cool.

About a month in, it started to feel pretty normal, which was proof you could get used to literally anything. You go and repair an AC unit in Wisconsin and get sucked through time like ice through a straw, crash in the past, get mistaken for a spy, then they figure out you’re from the future and basically draft you. And a month into living at the new place it seems ... normal. Sometimes Minnesota seemed like a dream. A really vivid one, sure, but getting hazier like dreams did.

The electromagnetic mechanical relay switches were really close to the ones you still saw on 2005 HVAC systems, though. Well, except they were almost bigger than his hand. One lousy bit the size of a burger!

He took to repairing the switches whenever he could instead of trying to get new parts, and kept the mysterious chunk of relays chained together than he was assigned to running. He really didn’t know what exactly it was, aside from some kind of a — hundred-bit processor? They called bits “units” and he was starting to do it too. They called the whole thing a “bombe” which he wasn’t sure if it was an inside joke or just a weird name.

He made work-friends with the guys — well, the chicks — who actually ran the thing pretty fast. They were pretty cool and really freaking smart and knew a lot more than him, and they never put him in a bad spot security-wise by talking shop, ever. Hacker Spirit was older than computers, that was for sure. When he didn’t eat lunch with Nigel they’d invite him along with them. At some point he hit some kind of equilibrium and stopped losing weight. About time.

He got a salary and could truck around outside on the grounds when he wasn’t on the clock. In a way it was a tough job, no room for error, but he had it better than the operators, whose job took just insane skill.

A lot of them were basically English Valley Girls, which he hadn’t expected. Debs, they called them, short for Debutantes, but they were all total aces, at least all the ones he met. Others were engineers or soldiers. Sailors, he guessed he should say, since they were in the navy. They called them wrens, for some reason.

Men and women both basically wore their uniforms if they felt like it, interns (or whatever) would roll up to big bosses with ideas, and it wasn’t weird. Well, it wasn’t weird to them. It was weird to him. There were eighteen-year-olds in the mix, and they pretty much all seemed even younger than that to him. It was like since they couldn’t figure out a way to make a chain of command work for a hyper-secret modular sealed-off setup that was half civilian and half military actually work, they just gave up and did whatever.

On the flip side, it was clear what your job was and you had to get your shit done and get it done perfectly. Like a factory owned by army hippies. Army hippies who were running a side project to trash all the teacups in the UK. Like seriously, these people treated them like paper cups.

It’d apparently gotten so bad that the government said they weren’t going to send them any more and Turing straight-up chained his to the radiator in his office. Mateo wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes when he went in to deliver a message.

“Get out!” Nigel said when he told him. Picking up expressions was a two-way street. “Did it have a lock?”

“Yeah, duh, did you figure he welded it on?”

“Key or combination?”

“Nigel—“

“Combination would be interesting, might try his birthday first —“

“Nigel!” Mateo sounded like this nut was planning to knock the Pope’s hat off.

“Shh, I’m trying to think.”

Mateo had thrown up his hands and left. Super-genius probably should have known what would happen when you showed an office full of codebreakers a puzzle.

He went off to take his lunch break with his co-workers like they usually did, sitting by the lake now that it was warming up, and once they finished their tea they straight-up carefully floated them off across the lake like kids with newspaper boats, and laughed when he sputtered.

“Go on, Mat, you know you want to!”

“No way, I want seconds!”

“Just get another cup, then.”

“Get another cup?!”

“Why not?”

He changed the subject to get away with not littering with perfectly good stuff. “I saw a guy on my first day here throw his cup in the lake. Is he just no good at floating ‘em?”

“Oh, that’s Dilly Knox! He must have had an idea, good.”

“Well, it could have been Josh Cooper or Hugh Alexander — what did he look like?”

“I didn’t get a good look,” Mateo admitted. “It was really early and there was fog coming off the water.”

“Wait until he sees Mr. Turing cycling about with a gas mask on in summer,” said a programmer wisely. Nia, he remembered, from a place called Cardiff. She’d stood out at first for wearing pants on cold night shifts and skirts on what the Brits called hot days, then for telling him that sure, she had a math degree, but she was mostly transferred here for writing crosswords. He’d thought that was a joke at first until she’d set him up with some crosswords. Then he decided that British crosswords were impossible, and possibly cursed.

“He does what?”

“He gets hay fever but he still likes to cycle.” A friend of hers stole his teacup while he was still trying to process that image and floated it gently out onto the water. The others cracked up laughing when he noticed and made a grab for it, too late.

“Is there something in the water here or what?” Mateo said. “Geez!”

“A bunch of teacups?” Nia said, logically.

“No, of course not,” the teacup thief/ programmer said sternly.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to knock the bigshots, I just meant—“

“It’s in the tea.” They cracked up again and this time he did too. He couldn’t help himself.

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