The elevator fell five decades in three seconds flat.
“We need to calibrate this thing, to synchronize it on a decade-floor basis,” Raitek said.
“Is that really necessary?” Jonathan asked.
“Do you even have to ask?”
Patel looked up at both men and sighed almost inaudibly. He was used to the young, eager tech from Ghana, always wanting to know more, to push the envelope further, to suck up every quantum of information as if he were a sponge, a veritable black hole.
But he still wasn’t used to this weird manager from Brazil. They had already been working on this project for months when the higher powers saw fit to send this guy all the way from Rio de Janeiro to Accra. All just because he had a top-notch score in project-trimming and problem-solving? The man wasn’t even a scientist, for crying out loud!
“Jonathan does have a point, actually,” he decided to cut in. “Why is it necessary, really?”
Raitek raised his left hand and lifted two fingers.
“Two reasons,” he said. “First, the symmetry. The more symmetrical a relationship we can establish, the better we can gauge and calculate the length of the prototype's displacement in time.”
Patel considered the fact for a little while, then wobbled his head in agreement. “It stands to reason,” he said.
“And the second?” asked Jonathan.
Raitek opened a smile from ear to ear.
“Thought you’d never ask,” he said. “Second is the beauty of it.”
Time travel was discovered in 2077.
As happens with many scientific discoveries, it was completely accidental. Sometimes you are looking for one thing when another gets in the way, with results you are most definitely not expecting. Take Viagra. Or antigravity associated with superconductors.
Time travel was discovered during experiments on locative media and augmented reality as applied to elevators.
Anyway, it happened at a very interesting time in history. The human race had suffered a long period of war and disease, which ended on a grim note in the 2060s with the Second American Civil War and the Big European Depression. Even though it was still far from universal peace and understanding, it seemed to be entering a period of relative tranquility. A post-virtual environment embedded in antigravitational elevators—part of an ambiance designed to soothe and distract people during the long risings and falls through the two hundred or so floors of the arcologies—seemed as good a place as any to give this new age a jumpstart.The environment turned out to be not only a virtuality but a time displacement device which took its occupants to a very different set of coordinates from what was expected. Suffice it to say that, when the doors of the elevator opened, the dumbfounded passengers were not in Accra anymore—at least not in 2077 Accra, but in a shabby building in that same city… one with a mere thirteen floors. And, more importantly, according to the ceiling display that showed date and time, in 2011.
After a few minutes of absolute confusion and, in one case, total denial, the temporary denizens of the past—two techs and one project manager—returned to the elevator and told it to get them back to where they had come from. Fortunately, it was able to do so. They got out of the elevator safe and sound, back where—and when—they belonged. Without knowing why it had happened.
But intending to find out.
It took Hiran Patel, the project manager who was aboard the elevator when the “episode” (the only word they used inside the lab and the building to refer to the incident) happened, a couple of days to be sure everything was under wraps, so upper management didn’t find out what had really happened. He wanted to reproduce the conditions of the experiment again before he could present it to the board of directors with a new business proposal: to establish a time agency travel somewhere in the past (probably 2011 Accra, if the elevator could somehow only go to a fixed point—the mathematics would still have to be worked out) and offer his clients a plus. He could get quite a bonus for that.
Unfortunately, things didn’t work out so easily. As soon as the veracity of the time displacement procedure was established, the bureaucrats came.
They had the facilities shut down until further notice. Not only the labs of creation, production and ambiance editing, not even only the lab containing the elevator carriage used to test it, but the entire building, even unrelated areas. Every lab tech, every assistant, even the secretaries and cleaning staff were politely asked to remain inside the premises for as long as it should be needed to debrief everyone. Everyone’s needs, one of the bureaucrats said (Patel couldn’t tell who, they all looked the same to him), would be taken care of.
Patel was the head of the software team at the time the discovery was made. This meant that, until the arrival of the bureaucrats, he was in charge of a team of eight people, namely: three programmers, three IE (immersion environment) modeling designers and two WS (world¬builder/scriptwriters), most of them from the games industry, seduced by the allure of making money in the glamorous countries of New Western Africa that thrived on software production after the collapse of Europe in the ’30s.
Patel was one of them; he had come all the way from Wolverhampton, leaving behind a so-so life developing robotic pets as companions for elderly people in home care facilities. But it wasn’t as if England had anything else of significance to offer him, and besides, he had no attachments there, nothing that really mattered. When he first saw the sun glinting on the top of the brand new Nkrumah arcology thrusting up from the middle of Greater Accra, that Solerian dream dwarfing the now obsolete postmodern steel-and-glass buildings, with their mere two or three dozen storeys, he knew he had made the right decision.
When the bureaucrats came, however, he started to have second thoughts.
Then the man from Brazil arrived. A tall, black, bald, lean man in his mid-thirties, with an easygoing smile that won over most of the team.
Except Patel. He knew better than to trust a suit.
The man walked up to him and extended a big hand.
“Raitek da Silva,” he said in a perfect English. “Nice to meet you, Mr Patel.”
Patel shook his hand. A surprisingly rough hand, very different from the well-manicured jobs he associated with most bureaucrats.
“Care to show me your research?”
“What can I possibly show you that I haven’t already, Mr Da Silva?”
“Please, call me Raitek. Seriously. We’re going to work round the clock here, and I won’t be wearing this suit for much longer, you feel me? Besides, you may have shown the other executives, but you haven’t shown me anything. And I am the one you must show things to. So, if you please…”
Patel didn’t like the patronizing tone, but he already had his orders from above. He had no choice.
So they went for the Grand Tour of the Little Lab.
“In the beginning,” Patel said, “we were simply researching a more high-resolution and cost-effective immersion environment to be used in arcology elevators. Something to pass the time, and to act as a pressure valve for borderline claustrophobic individuals.
“Then something went wrong. During one of the experiments with the prototype, we lost the signal from the car.”
He paused, more for dramatic effect than for anything else, and glanced at Raitek. The suit was still listening attentively, hands behind his back. Patel went on.
“Five minutes later, the signal was reestablished. When the car was opened and the three team members aboard it were debriefed, they all said the same thing: that the doors had opened on another place and another time. That they were apparently still in Accra, but, according to the elevator display, in 2011.”
Then Raitek raised a hand.
“Can you trust them completely?”
“Mr Da Silva,” Patel said. “I was there. I am one of them.”
Raitek nodded.
“So I am to assume the lab cameras registered everything? And the car never left the lab?”
“As I have told your men countless times. They have the records.”
“They are not my men. So: you all must have traveled, if such a time travel really occurred, in some sort of ‘bubble’ inside the car?”
“As I’m sure you already know, that is the current theory, yes.”
Raitek stopped, straightened himself and looked around. “Do you have a private room, Hiram? May I call you Hiram? And, please, call me Raitek. I really insist.”
Patel had to control himself not to huff audibly. “This way. And my name is Hiran, ending with an ‘n’, not an ‘m’, if you please… Raitek.
Raitek grimaced.
“Ok. As long as you don’t forget to pronounce my name with a guttural ‘R’. It’s not a weak ‘R’. It’s more like a roar, if you please, Hiram.”
Both went silent the rest of the way. When they entered Patel’s office and he closed the door, Raitek turned to him and suddenly changed his tone. He went from that easygoing mode to utter seriousness and delivered the following speech, almost as if in a robotic mode:
“Do you want to know what I do, Hiran? Do you really want to know what I’m here for? I’m going to tell you.
“I compress stories.
“These are times of raw information. Information is not knowledge—at least not until it gets mixed with reference and experience. Then it becomes something else: it gets transmuted, translated into a legible, understandable message.
“Information is pure data being fed to you from every possible source at the same time. People like me act like human filters. In the past, some tried to call us names: Googlists, information curators, Gibsonians. I don’t call myself anything. I am what I am. In fact, I don’t do anything you don’t already do. When you open a book, do you read all its pages at once? No. You read them one by one. Whether on a linear basis or not, it doesn’t matter. When you watch a bustling, crowded street at rush hour, are you able to take in every single face in the sea of people who threatens to engulf you from all around? Of course not.
“I just happen to be able to do it a little bit better.
“I take the ancient concept of the memory palace and shrink it down to the size of a 1:72 scale model. A die-cast aircraft toy of a memory palace in my head. All I do then is move the goods in.
“The process is like unloading a removal van. But, instead of big, tidy boxes crammed with info, I picture amorphous masses, not hard stuff, but spongiform ones instead, bouncy buckyballs with tiny spikes all over their surfaces, like weird alternate-Earth Mongol-Raygun-Gothic antennas. I stuff the place with them, and their antennas start telescoping and touching each other. Kinky alien robot sex. I always thought it a bit too cyberpunk-chic-démodé, but it’s deeply imprinted in my culture. I’m comfortable with the imagery.
“The balls interconnect and form a rhizome. The information sexes up and creates a wave of mutilation. All the data is cut, cropped, pasted. Measured, compared, verified. After all this processing, I expand the memory palace… and the knowledge is there. Not so simple, but you don’t need to know every single step, do you?
“To keep it short: I’m the one you’re looking for. I am the one you need to collate all the data you've amassed, to make some sense of all your fucked-up experiences. I came here to salvage your invention, and to save your ass in the process. Is that clear or not, Hiran?”
Patel was impressed with the apparent intelligence of the man, but not with the vulgar display of power. He knew it came with the suit, even if the Brazilian bureaucrat decided to change clothes later.
“It is clear, Raitek.”
The easy smile came back to the Brazilian man’s face as quickly as it had vanished.
“Good. Good, man. We’ll work this out. You will see.”
Patel nodded. But he was not amused.
The next day began on a lighter note. As promised, Raitek wasn’t wearing a suit: to match the hot weather of Ghana, he wore a light blue polo shirt, khaki pants, and flip-flops. Patel noticed the man’s feet were well-manicured.
“Salve, moçada! Tudo beleza?” he said to everyone in a loud, happy voice. “Let’s get to work, shall we?”
As if we haven’t already been working our asses off for months, thought a disgruntled Patel, still combing his hair. He missed his flat. He missed his freedom. He was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the increasingly military vibe of this whole lockin. He didn’t respond well to authority. That was why he always preferred working for civilian companies. This time, however, he thought he might have made the wrong choice. Maybe there was no right choice at all in this line of work. It was a depressing thought.
“Good morning, Hiran,” Raitek said, closing on him like a shark upon its prey. “Shall we begin the mission briefing?”
“What mission?”
“Why, the retrieval mission, of course.” Raitek showed his big-toothed smile.
In five minutes the entire team was in the meeting room.
“The funny thing,” Raitek started the briefing, “is that we never see the elevator disappear at any given moment in time, from our side.”
“Yes,” a young black man cut in. “This happens because only the environment travels in time.”
Raitek stared for just the smallest amount of time at the young man.
“You are Jonathan, right? Jonathan Kufuor? One of the techs who was originally in the carriage when it traveled back?”
The young man smiled.
“Yes, sir. That’s me.”
“Call me Raitek, please. Same goes to everyone here. No red tape, no ass-kissing. We must do what we must do. The sooner we get this solved, the sooner we get home.”
Yes, but we are staying here and you are going to a hotel every night, Patel thought grimly. Nice try, though.
“Do we know why that happened, Jonathan?” Raitek asked.
“Not exactly,” he answered.
“But we suspect,” Patel said.
Raitek nodded. “Pray tell.”
“The Faraday cage principle.”
Raitek shook his head. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but I agree with you that the analogy seems solid enough.”
“Why is that?”
“We are not talking about electricity here, but tachyon flow.”
“We haven’t established this with absolute certainty yet.”
“You probably won’t,” Raitek said. “We don’t have the tech for it, nor the necessary measurement tools. Unless we use the Gambiarra Method.”
“The what?”
“It’s just a thing we learn to do in Brazil,” Raitek explained. “How to do things with whatever you have at hand.”
“Oh, you mean a kludge,” Jonathan said.
“No, not a kludge,” Raitek corrected him. “Kludges are for electromechanical things. A gambiarra goes for anything. Even abstract stuff.”
“And how do you propose we use this gambiarra of yours…?” asked Patel, already feeling very uncomfortable. The Brazilian guy was insane.
“First, assuming that everything you experienced was absolutely real, and not an illusion provoked by extreme immersion, what probably happened was that a bubble formed inside the carriage. Not a spherical, topologically perfect bubble, but an extradimensional structure, or better yet, an n-dimensional structure according to the parameters of the Calabi-Yau Manifold.
“Theoretically, a Calabi-Yau space can project itself beyond the borders of our, let’s say for lack of a better term, ‘traditional’ space. Kähler manifolds could also apply, but the calculus involved seems to make it a poorer choice. Right now, it doesn’t matter: we should be able to repeat the experiment with no problem at all and no harm to the test subjects.”
“Test subjects? What do you mean, test subjects?” said Patel.
“May I go again?” asked Jonathan.
Damn, thought Patel. This is getting out of control.
As Raitek explained to them, the Calabi-Yau Manifold (if that was what really formed inside the elevator) opened not a window, but a kind of excrescence, something like a vesicle, a ballooning organ with only one end stretching towards our so-called normal reality. So, one could enter and exit the CYM via this stretch the same way one could use a door—probably, in this case, the elevator doors. Maybe they would not even need to do alignment procedures.
“We’ll probably have to do lots of calibrations for years and decades before going for something bigger,” Raitek said. “That is, if the mechanism isn’t already locked in 2011.”
“What makes you think so?” asked Patel.
“Nothing special,” said Raitek. “Science fiction stories. And wormhole theories.”
“I thought you were pretty sure about the manifold.”
“Well, quem tem dois, tem um. Quem tem um, não tem nenhum.”
“Come again?”
“It’s an old Brazilian saying. If you have two, actually you have only one. If you have one, you have none. Bottom line: you better be prepared and have a spare—a spare tire, a spare sonic screwdriver, a spare condom, a spare of anything you can possibly think of, because you will most probably need it.”
“A spare theory as well?”
“Yep. That too.”
In the second controlled experiment, the elevator fell four decades in three seconds.
Naturally, it wasn’t the elevator that was really falling, as it was mounted on a spring-based shock absorber structure. But the principle seemed to remain, as Jonathan reported being taken to a different decade each time. They weren’t able to calibrate the instruments well enough to account for years.
Another precaution they took this time was securing Jonathan to the carriage by rappelling equipment, harness, static rope attached to the guardrail. It wasn’t necessary in the end, but they did it all the same. All that Jonathan did was to get out whenever he happened to be, take a couple of steps, recording every sight and sound for no more than five minutes, then get back to the interior of the carriage, close the doors and pray to return to this own era. Which he did both times.
The only occasion nothing happened was when they decided to turn the immersion environment off.
“Okay, one thing we can be quite sure of,” Raitek concluded after the second experiment, “is that the immersion machinery is somehow the key. Now, another question: can we use it outside the elevator with the same result? Or can we use another elevator and different immersion machinery to the same effect?”
“This last question I can easily answer,” Patel said. “No, we cannot. We had two elevators and half a dozen immersion machineries running in parallel. Only this one presented this result.”
“Then we could normally say that something is wrong with this particular setting,” Raitek said. “Therefore, it’s an anomaly.”
“We already knew that.” This time Patel smiled.
Raitek turned back to him and said, “Hiran, I already know something else: you are a top-notch robotic expert who does not like to have your time wasted and is deeply pissed off by my very presence at what you consider to be your lab, even though you’ve worked for this company for much less time than I have. So I will propose a deal: don’t be smug with me and I will tell you what you don’t already know. How about that?”
Patel remained unamused. But this time he replied.
“As long as we can reciprocate.”
Raitek just nodded. And extended his hand.
What didn’t they know? First off, they couldn’t ascertain if the bubble inside the car was the byproduct of the Calabi-Yau Manifold or a portal to a wormhole, but the former theory held more water than the latter—issues of mass and gravity pertaining to wormholes made it almost impossible to think of them as a viable option.
The second thing: they never could reproduce the experiment outside the elevator. And the car had to be in motion, if only at a small rate of acceleration.
Acceleration. Raitek wondered if it played a major role in the events after all.
At the end of the day, he took the elevator in the central shaft and pushed the button for the top floor.
Raitek stepped out of the elevator and into the penthouse of the 400th floor. It was a sparsely furnished space, all-white, with very few interior walls. He liked the lofty aspect of the place, its half-spartan, half-samurai cleanliness. It reminded him a bit of his summer refuge in Rio; the concrete-and-woodplank house in the middle of Tijuca National Park was very different structurally, but the silence was almost the same. It gave him freedom to think.
He took a long, hot shower and lay on the queen-size futon in the bedroom. He closed his eyes and initiated the memory palace walkthrough.
The meditation technique took less time and was less cyberpunkish than he'd described it to Patel. Instead of spiky buckyballs, all he could see this time were cubes: cubes fitting inside each other, like an ancient 3D version of Tetris he’d played at his grandpa’s house as a kid—only in his vision they penetrated each other, almost as if they were having sex.
Then, suddenly, they all snapped into a giant megacube which started to slide down along an axis, and this axis was a shiny metal cable with no discernible end in sight. Raitek couldn’t see the interior of the cube. He did know, however, that the cable ran inside it as well, and anyone who touched it would be hurt by its speedy passage through the cube. The faster the cable ran, the bigger the chances someone would be badly cut or burned by the friction.
Acceleration mattered.
It was then that Raitek called Patel and Jonathan for an emergency meeting.
“Are you kidding?” Patel said.
“Is this what you called gambiarra?” Jonathan asked, amazed.
“This is one of its many possible variations, yes,” Raitek said. “Are you willing to try?”
“What are the risks?” Patel asked him.
Raitek spread his hands in the air.
“Honestly? No idea. All I know is that acceleration seems to be the key, here. I may be wrong; in which case, nothing out of the ordinary will occur. Hell, the fact the we will be using a different elevator means it probably won’t result in anything at all, so why not?”
Patel stopped a bit to consider. Indeed, why not? Wasn’t it to get out of the sameness of Old Europe that he had come to Ghana? Deep inside, didn’t he want to take chances, to take risks? Indeed, why the fuck not?
“Okay, but on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“I will go.”
The next day, a teary-eyed Jonathan was beside Raitek in the control room, following the preparation for the third experiment.
They had spent the previous night transferring the whole immersion machinery array to the elevator shaft at the center of the floor. It was a good thing that Raitek had the necessary clearance to bypass the proper channels.
“Too convenient, if you ask me,” Patel grumbled as they mounted the wafer-thin screens of the array inside the carriage.
“Hey, it’s all in the name of filthy lucre,” Raitek said half-jokingly. “They don’t want to jeopardize their investment. We live in the Golden Age of Science, blah blah blah.”
“You don’t believe that?”
“I believe in everything, Hiran,” he said. “The world is a big place, and everything you can possibly imagine exists. I’ve seen many strange things with these eyes.”
“Such as…?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do. Really.”
Raitek just shrugged. “Nothing that you haven’t seen in India.”
“I grew up in England.”
Raitek went mute for a while. Wow, that’s a first, Patel thought.
“Sorry,” he said after a minute. “I meant no prejudice.”
“It’s all right.”
“No. My grandfather hated it when some guy from the US called us chicanos or tried to talk to us in Spanish. Same thing, no excuse. Do you drink?”
“Not much. But a beer, occasionally, yes.”
“When this is all over, will you let me buy you a pint?”
Patel wobbled his head in a slight amusement. “Yes, sure. Thanks.”
“Thank you, Hiran. Thank you.”
That was then. This was now: a sweaty Patel checking his harness, his wraparound recording glasses and the impromptu emergency kit Raitek had given him at the last minute, checking them two, three, four times. He looked like a man with OCD. He didn’t give a fuck. He just wanted to know he was safe.
“All systems go, Hiran,” Raitek’s voice came over the elevator’s intercom. “Ready when you are.”
“Okay,” he replied. “Wish me luck.”
“Boa sorte, meu camarada,” Raitek said.
Patel breathed deeply and remembered what they had discussed in the last meeting: in the previous experiments, they had been very cautious, pressing buttons for no more than fifty floors, even though the feeling of acceleration wasn’t exactly corresponding.
This time, though, what should they do? More of the same could only bring the same results. More floors down could provoke an accident if they jumped to a past when the elevators hadn’t been invented yet. More floors up, on the other hand, could mean an incredible future—but what if they ended up in an ecologically improved Earth, one with no arcologies? What then? More importantly, would any of these scenarios affect the bubble and anyone inside it?
They just didn’t know.
In the end, they had reached a decision.
Patel pushed the button for one hundred floors up.
It was no big deal. The communication with Raitek was cut up immediately, but that was to be expected. The acceleration was smooth, but noticeable.
Then, full stop. The doors started to open. Patel felt immediately a freezing cold.
And the dark of space.
He was sucked to the void instantly, but felt the tug of the rope just before he could fall into the blackness. The only reason his eyes didn’t explode in their orbits was that the glasses were watertight, but he knew they wouldn’t resist for long. He gasped; not only he couldn’t breathe but he felt his trachea burning cold.
This is it, he thought. I’m going to die here.
His hands were already fumbling in the emergency bag.
And found the small oxygen unit there.
He quickly secured it over his mouth, but he couldn’t adjust the rubber strap: he started to feel numb, his fingers losing their grip. He should close the doors before he could inhale safely. He closed his eyes for just a second. Focus, Hiran, Focus. Then he opened his eyes and caught the rope, starting to pull himself painfully with one hand while still holding the oxygen mask with the other.
Then the mask slipped off; it started to drift away slowly, but by then he had already turned to the inside panel of the car, lifted a hand and pushed the emergency button. The doors closed. The car was a vacuum: would he survive when he got back?
He did.
“We were worried about you, mate,” Raitek said to him, sitting by his bed in the building’s small medical ward.
“I wonder why.” Patel managed a shadow of a smile.
Jonathan looked at him from a distance.
“He won’t admit it, but he was scared shitless,” Raitek said.
“I know,” Patel said. “I was too.”
“We all were.”
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t. It was an educated guess.”
“Too educated.”
“Here’s the thing: it turns out that acceleration wasn’t really the issue after all. You have think in systems of coordinates and geolocation tools. Later that night, I started wondering, what about the Earth’s orbit? Shouldn’t we be calculating to compensate the transit of Earth around the Sun? You’d be traveling in space as well as in time, after all, so your bubble would be slingshot towards Mercury, probably.”
“Probably.”
“I had too much on my mind to do all the math.”
“That makes sense.”
“Then I figured, hell, it’s too late for that, but not too late to take some precautions, just in case.”
“In case.”
“Exactly.”
“Thanks.”
“No. Thank you. You were the hero.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? You conned me into doing it. I won’t forget this!”
“We’ll discuss it over a beer as soon as you get better, all right? I’m going now,” and he started to get out of the room.
“One more thing,” Patel said.
“Yes?”
“Is Raitek a common name in Brazil? I must confess I don’t know much about your country aside from football, but I’ve never even heard of such a name before anywhere.”
Raitek smiled.
“Say it out loud again. This time slowly, separating the syllables. And don’t forget to exaggerate the initial R.”
“Like a roar.”
“Exactly.”
Patel did it.
“Fuck. Fuck.” He couldn’t help it.
The other man shrugged. “My mother was a sucker for puns. And for hi-tech too, of course. How’s that for a geek, huh?”
“One more thing,” Raitek said, coming back to the bedside. “I took the liberty of filing the whole project under a FAIL tag. I already had a talk with the rest of the team. They were pretty shaken up after what happened to you, and they all agreed with it.”
“Wait, why? After all we did?”
“Because a FAIL tag is better than a DANGEROUS one. A DANGEROUS tag means it’s a good project, ready to be revived at a later date with the right team and the right equipment. That is…”
“Not us.”
“Exactly.”
“But then what? Did I work in vain?”
“Not at all,” Raitek said. “I have clearance with failed projects. What would you say if I got you a transfer to Brazil? We have an arcology in São Paulo that’s a bit higher than this, and you’d have everything you needed to start working right away—including a better paycheck.”
Patel squinted. He could feel a massive headache coming.
“What’s the point? What can we do there we can’t do here?” he tried to keep his voice down.
“We have a good aerospace agency in Brazil,” Raitek said.
“I still don’t understand.”
Then Raitek smiled again that devious smile of his.
“Why, Hiran, you wanted to open a travel agency, and so does the company. But, after what happened to you, I was thinking of aiming a little higher. Why not the stars, Hiran? Why not space travel?”
Hiran Patel and Raitek da Silva arrived in São Paulo three weeks later—time enough to move the necessary equipment and transfer everyone in the team who wanted to go with them (a condition Patel imposed to close the deal). Jonathan was among the group.
In Brazil, the team doubled in size, as did their workload. They had better working conditions, better equipment, an almost stress-free environment and lots of money.
“We can do better, Hiran,” Raitek told him when the lab was finally ready to work. “We can change the game for good.”
“The company will back us in this?” Hiran asked him.
“Never mind the company,” he said. “I’m applying the gambiarra method here too.” Suddenly he stopped smiling and said, “Want to know why?”
Hiran stared at him.
“Why the gambiarra? Of course I do.”
“No. The gambiarra goes without saying. I meant why Brazil.”
“Oh. Okay, carry on.”
“In Ghana, as well as in Europe, Hiram, space exploration is still the domain of the military. Not in Brazil.
“We also had a military space program here in the 20th century, did you know that? No, you didn’t. Almost nobody didn’t. It was no big secret. It just happened people wasn’t that much interested in anything coming from a banana republic then. Until 2003, when a rocket intended to get two satellites in orbit exploded on its launch pad. It killed twenty-one civilian techs.
“After what was considered a thorough military enquiry—to which no civilian had access—the official investigation report said that the explosion was caused by dangerous buildups of volatile gases, deterioration of sensors and electromagnetic interference at the launch site. Nobody could prove if it was true, but after that our space program pretty much stopped. The military one, that is.”
“You mean that there are civilian companies working on space exploration now?”
Then Raitek’s broad face broke into a smile again. He produced a laminated card from the inner pocket of his jacket. It was a dull grey ultrathin plastic job, featuring his name, an old redundancy QR-code and, most important, the acronym of the company: AIM.
“There is one now,” he said.