The Windup Girl, Page 2

  The SpringLife factory rises over the traffic press, a high-walled fortress punctuated by huge fans turning slowly in its upper story vents. Across the soi a Chaozhou bicycle factory mirrors it, and between them, the barnacle accretion of jumbled street carts that always clog around the entrances of factories, selling snacks and lunches to the workers inside.

  Lao Gu brakes inside the SpringLife courtyard and deposits Anderson before the factory's main doors. Anderson climbs down from the rickshaw, grabs his sack of ngaw, and stands for a moment, staring up at the eight-meter wide doors that facilitate megodont access. The factory ought to be renamed Yates' Folly. The man was a terrible optimist. Anderson can still hear him arguing the wonders of genehacked algae, digging through desk drawers for graphs and scrawled notes as he protested.

  "You can't pre-judge my work just because the Ocean Bounty project was a failure. Properly cured, the algae provides exponential improvements in torque absorption. Forget its calorie potential. Focus on the industrial applications. I can deliver the entire energy storage market to you, if you'll just give me a little more time. Try one of my demo springs at least, before you make a decision. . ."

  The roar of manufacturing envelopes Anderson as he enters the factory, drowning out the last despairing howl of Yates' optimism.

  Megodonts groan against spindle cranks, their enormous heads hanging low, prehensile trunks scraping the ground as they tread slow circles around power spindles. The genehacked animals comprise the living heart of the factory's drive system, providing energy for conveyor lines and venting fans and manufacturing machinery. Their harnesses clank rhythmically as they strain forward. Union handlers in red and gold walk beside their charges, calling out to the beasts, switching them occasionally, encouraging the elephant-derived animals to greater labor.

  On the opposite side of the factory, the production line excretes newly packaged kink-springs, sending them past Quality Assurance and on to Packaging where the springs are palletized in preparation for some theoretical time when they will be ready for export. At Anderson's arrival on the floor, workers pause in their labors and wai, pressing their palms together and raising them to their foreheads in a wave of respect that cascades down the line.

  Banyat, his head of QA, hurries over smiling. He wais.

  Anderson gives a perfunctory wai in return. "How's quality?"

  Banyat smiles. "Dee khap. Good. Better. Come, look." He signals up the line and Num, the day foreman, rings the warning bell that announces full line stop. Banyat motions Anderson to follow. "Something interesting. You will be pleased."

  Anderson smiles tightly, doubting that anything Banyat says will be truly pleasing. He pulls a ngaw out of the bag and offers it to the QA man. "Progress? Really?"

  Banyat nods as he takes the fruit. He gives it a cursory glance and peels it. Pops the semi-translucent heart into his mouth. He shows no surprise. No special reaction. Just eats the damn thing without a second thought. Anderson grimaces. Farang are always the last to know about changes in the country, a fact that Hock Seng likes to point out when his paranoid mind begins to suspect that Anderson intends to fire him. Hock Seng probably already knows about this fruit as well, or will pretend when he asks.

  Banyat tosses the fruit's pit into a bin of feed for the megodonts and leads Anderson down the line. "We fixed a problem with the cutting press," he says.

  Num rings his warning bell again and workers step back from their stations. On the third sounding of the bell, the union mahout tap their charges with bamboo switches and the megodonts shamble to a halt. The production line slows. At the far end of the factory, industrial kink-spring drums tick and squeal as the factory's flywheels shed power into them, the juice that will restart the line when Anderson is done inspecting.

  Banyat leads Anderson down the now silent line, past more wai-ing workers in their green and white livery, and pushes aside the palm oil polymer curtains that mark the entrance to the fining room. Here, Yates' industrial discovery is sprayed with glorious abandon, coating the kink-springs with the residue of genetic serendipity. Women and children wearing triple-filter masks look up and tear away their breathing protection to wai deeply to the man who feeds them. Their faces are streaked with sweat and pale powder. Only the skin around their mouths and noses remains dark where the filters have protected them.

  He and Banyat pass through the far side and into the swelter of the cutting rooms. Temper lamps blaze with energy and the tide pool reek of breeding algae clogs the air. Overhead, tiered racks of drying screens reach the ceiling, smeared with streamers of generipped algae, dripping and withering and blackening into paste in the heat. The sweating line techs are stripped to nearly nothing—just shorts and tanks and protective head gear. It is a furnace, despite the rush of crank fans and generous venting systems. Sweat rolls down Anderson's neck. His shirt is instantly soaked.

  Banyat points. "Here. See." He runs his finger along a disassembled cutting bar that lies beside the main line. Anderson kneels to inspect the surface. "Rust," Banyat murmurs.

  "I thought we inspected for that."

  "Saltwater." Banyat smiles uncomfortably. "The ocean is close."

  Anderson grimaces at the dripping algae racks overhead. "The algae tanks and drying racks don't help. Whoever thought we could just use waste heat to cure the stuff was a fool. Energy efficient my ass."

  Banyat gives another embarrassed smile, but says nothing.

  "So you've replaced the cutting tools?"

  "Twenty-five percent reliability now."

  "That much better?" Anderson nods perfunctorily. He signals to the tool leader and the man shouts out through the fining room to Num. The warning bell rings again and the heat presses and temper lamps begin to glow as electricity pours into the system. Anderson shies from the sudden increase in heat. The burning lamps and presses represent a carbon tax of fifteen thousand baht every time they begin to glow, a portion of the Kingdom's own global carbon budget that SpringLife pays handsomely to siphon off. Yates' manipulation of the system was ingenious, allowing the factory to use the country's carbon allocation, but the expense of the necessary bribes is still extraordinary.

  The main flywheels spin up and the factory shivers as gears beneath the floor engage. The floorboards vibrate. Kinetic power sparks through the system like adrenaline, a tingling anticipation of the energy about to pour into the manufacturing line. A megodont screams protest and is lashed into silence. The whine of the flywheels rises to a howl, and then cuts off as joules gush into the drive system.

  The line boss' bell rings again. Workers step forward to align the cutting tools. They're producing two-gigajoule kink-springs, and the smaller size requires extra care with the machinery. Further down the line, the spooling process begins and the cutting press with its newly repaired precision blades rises into the air on hydraulic jacks, hissing.

  "Khun, please." Banyat motions Anderson behind a protection cage.

  Num's bell rings a final time. The line grinds into gear. Anderson feels a brief thrill as the system engages. Workers crouch behind their shields. Kink-spring filament hisses out from alignment flanges and threads through a series of heated rollers. A spray of stinking reactant showers the rust-colored filament, greasing it in the slick film that will accept Yates' algae powder in an even coat.

  The press slams down. Anderson's teeth ache with the crush of weight. The kink-spring wire snaps cleanly and then the severed filament is streaming through the curtains and into the fining room. Thirty seconds later it reemerges, pale gray and dusty with the algae-derived powder. It threads into a new series of heated rollers before being tortured into its final structure, winding in on itself, torquing into a tighter and tighter curl, working against everything in its molecular structure as the spring is tightened down. A deafening shriek of tortured metal rises. Lubricants and algae residue shower from the sheathing as the spring is squeezed down, spattering workers and equipment, and then the compressed kink-spring is being whisked away t
o be installed in its case and sent on to QA.

  A yellow LED flashes all-clear. Workers dash out from their cages to reset the press as a new stream of rust-colored metal hisses out of the bowels of the tempering rooms. Rollers chatter, running empty. Stoppered lubricant nozzles cast a fine mist into the air as they self-cleanse before the next application. The workers finish aligning the presses then duck again behind their barriers. If the system breaks, the kink-spring filament will become a high energy blade, whipping uncontrollably through the production room. Anderson has seen heads carved open like soft mangoes, the shorn parts of people and the Pollack-spatter of blood that comes from industrial system failures—

  The press slams down, clipping another kink-spring among the forty per hour that now, apparently, will have only a seventy-five percent chance of ending up in a supervised disposal fill at the Environment Ministry. They're spending millions to produce trash that will cost millions more to destroy—a double-edged sword that just keeps cutting. Yates screwed something up, whether by accident or by spiteful sabotage, and it's taken more than a year to realize the depths of the problem, to examine the algae baths that breed the kink-springs' revolutionary coatings, to rework the corn resins that enclose the springs' gear interfaces, to change the QA practices, to understand what a humidity level that hovers near 100% year-round does to a manufacturing process conceptualized in drier climes.

  A burst of pale filtering dust kicks into the room as a worker stumbles through the curtains from the fining chamber. His dark face is a sweat-streaked combination of grit and palm-oil spray. The swinging curtains reveal a glimpse of his colleagues encased in pale dust clouds, shadows in a snowstorm as the kink-spring filament is encased in the powder that keeps the springs from locking under intense compression. All that sweat, all those calories, all that carbon allotment—all to present a believable cover for Anderson as he unravels the mystery of nightshades and ngaw.

  A rational company would shut down the factory. Even Anderson, with his limited understanding of the processes involved in this next-generation kink-spring manufacture would do so. But if his workers and the unions and the white shirts and the many listening ears of the Kingdom are to believe that he is an aspiring entrepreneur, the factory must run, and run hard.

  Anderson shakes Banyat's hand and congratulates him on his good work.

  It's a pity, really. The potential for success is there. When Anderson sees one of Yates' springs actually work, his breath catches. Yates was a madman, but he wasn't stupid. Anderson has watched joules pour out of tiny kink-spring cases, ticking along contentedly for hours when other springs wouldn't have held a quarter of the energy at twice the weight, or would simply have constricted into a single molecularly bound mass under the enormous pressure of the joules being dumped into them. Sometimes, Anderson is almost seduced by the man's dream.

  Anderson takes a deep breath and ducks back through the fining room. He comes out on the other side in a cloud of algae powder and smoke. He sucks air redolent with trampled megodont dung and heads up the stairs to his offices. Behind him one of the megodonts shrieks again, the sound of a mistreated animal. Anderson turns, gazing down on the factory floor, and makes a note of the mahout. Number Four spindle. Another problem in the long list that SpringLife presents. He opens the door to the administrative offices.

  Inside, the rooms are much as they were when he first encountered them. Still dim, still cavernously empty with desks and treadle computers sitting silent in shadows. Thin blades of sunlight ease between teak window shutters, illuminating smoky offerings to whatever gods failed to save Tan Hock Seng's Chinese clan in Malaya. Sandalwood incense chokes the room, and more silken streamers rise from a shrine in the corner where smiling golden figures squat over dishes of U-Tex rice and sticky fly-covered mangoes.

  Hock Seng is already sitting at his computer. His bony leg ratchets steadily at the treadle, powering the microprocessors and the glow of the 12cm screen. In its gray light, Anderson catches the flicker of Hock Seng's eyes, the twitch of a man fearing bloody slaughter every time a door opens. The old man's flinch is as hallucinogenic as a cheshire's fade—one moment there, the next gone and doubted—but Anderson is familiar enough with yellow card refugees to recognize the suppressed terror. He shuts the door, muting the manufacturing roar, and the old man settles.

  Anderson coughs and waves at the swirling incense smoke. "I thought I told you to quit burning this stuff."

  Hock Seng shrugs, but doesn't stop treadling or typing. "Shall I open the windows?" His whisper is like bamboo scraping over sand.

  "Christ, no." Anderson grimaces at the tropic blaze beyond the shutters. "Just burn it at home. I don't want it here. Not any more."

  "Yes. Of course."

  "I mean it."

  Hock Seng's eyes flick up for a moment before returning to his screen. The jut of his cheek bones and the hollows of his eyes show in sharp relief under the glow of the monitor. His spider fingers continue tapping at the keys. "It's for luck," he murmurs. A low wheezing chuckle follows. "Even foreign devils need luck. With all the factory troubles, I think maybe you would appreciate the help of Budai."

  "Not here." Anderson dumps his newly acquired ngaw on his desk and sprawls in his chair. Wipes his brow. "Burn it at home."

  Hock Seng inclines his head slightly in acknowledgment. Overhead, the rows of crank fans rotate lazily, bamboo blades panting against the office's swelter. The two of them sit marooned, surrounded by the map of Yates' grand design. Ranks of empty desks and workstations sit silent, the floor plan that should have held sales staff, shipping logistics clerks, HR people, and secretaries.

  Anderson sorts through the ngaw. Holds up one of his green-haired discoveries for Hock Seng. "Have you ever seen one of these before?"

  Hock Seng glances up. "The Thai call them ngaw." He returns to his work, treadling through spreadsheets that will never add and red ink that will never be reported.

  "I know what the Thai call them." Anderson gets up and crosses to the old man's desk. Hock Seng flinches as Anderson sets the ngaw beside his computer, eyeing the fruit as if it is a scorpion. Anderson says, "The farmers in the market could tell me the Thai name. Did you have them down in Malaya, too?"

  "I—" Hock Seng starts to speak, then stops. He visibly fights for self-control, his face working through a flicker-flash of emotions. "I—" Again, he breaks off.

  Anderson watches fear mold and re-mold Hock Seng's features. Less than one percent of the Malayan Chinese escaped the Incident. By any measure, Hock Seng is a lucky man, but Anderson pities him. A simple question, a piece of fruit, and the old man looks as if he's about to flee the factory.

  Hock Seng stares at the ngaw, breath rasping. Finally he murmurs, "None in Malaya. Only Thais are clever with such things." And then he is working again, eyes fixed on his little computer screen, memories locked away.

  Anderson waits to see if Hock Seng will reveal anything more but the old man doesn't raise his eyes again. The puzzle of the ngaw will have to wait.

  Anderson returns to his own desk and starts sifting through the mail. Receipts and tax papers that Hock Seng has prepared sit at one corner of his desk, demanding attention. He begins working through the stack, adding his signature to Megodont Union paychecks and the SpringLife chop to waste disposal approvals. He tugs at his shirt, fanning himself against the increasing heat and humidity.

  Eventually Hock Seng looks up. "Banyat was looking for you."

  Anderson nods, distracted by the forms. "They found rust on the cutting press. The replacement improved reliability by five percent."

  "Twenty-five percent, then?"

  Anderson shrugs, flips more pages, adds his chop to an Environment Ministry carbon assessment. "That's what he says." He folds the document back into its envelope.

  "Still not a profitable statistic. Your springs are all wind and no release. They keep joules the way the Somdet Chaopraya keeps the Child Queen."

  Anderson makes a face of irr
itation but doesn't bother defending the erratic quality.

  "Did Banyat also tell you about the nutrient tanks?" Hock Seng asks. "For the algae?"

  "No. Just the rust. Why?"

  "They have been contaminated. Some of the algae is not producing the. . ." Hock Seng hesitates. "The skim. It is not productive."

  "He didn't mention it to me."

  Another slight hesitation. Then, "I'm sure he tried."

  "Did he say how bad it was?"

  Hock Seng shrugs. "Just that the skim does not meet specifications."

  Anderson scowls. "I'm firing him. I don't need a QA man who can't actually tell me the bad news."

  "Perhaps you were not paying close attention."

  Anderson has a number of words for people who try to raise a subject and then somehow fail, but he's interrupted by a scream from the megodont downstairs. The noise is loud enough to make the windows shake. Anderson pauses, listening for a follow-up cry.

  "That's the Number Four power spindle," he says. "The mahout is incompetent."

  Hock Seng doesn't look up from his typing. "They are Thai. They are all incompetent."

  Anderson stifles a laugh at the yellow card's assessment. "Well, that one is worse." He goes back to his mail. "I want him replaced. Number Four spindle. Remember that."

  Hock Seng's treadle loses its rhythm. "This is a difficult thing, I think. Even the Dung Lord must bow before the Megodont Union. Without the labor of the megodonts, one must resort to the joules of men. Not a powerful bargaining position."

  "I don't care. I want that one out. We can't afford a stampede. Find some polite way to get rid of him." Anderson pulls over another stack of paychecks waiting for his signature.

  Hock Seng tries again. "Khun, negotiating with the union is a complicated thing."

  "That's why I have you. It's called delegating." Anderson continues flipping the papers.