This building was officially the Blind Lake Computational Array, but it was commonly called Eyeball Alley, or the Alley, or simply the Eye.

Charlie Grogan had been chief engineer at the Alley since it had been powered up five years ago. Tonight he was working late, if you could call it “working late” when it was his regular custom to stick around well after the day shift had gone home. There was, of course, a night shift, and a supervising engineer to go with it (Anne Costigan, whose abilities he had come to respect). But it was precisely this relaxation of his official vigilance that made the after-hours shift rewarding. He could catch up on paperwork without risk of interruption. Better, he could go down into the hardware rooms or the O/BEC gallery and hang out with the hands-on guys in a non-official capacity. He enjoyed spending time in the works.

Tonight he finished filling out a requisition form and told his server to transmit it in the morning. He checked his watch. Ten to nine. The guys in the stacks were due for a break. Just a walk-through, Charlie promised himself. Then home to feed Boomer, his elderly hound, and maybe catch some downloads before bed. The eternal cycle.

He left his office and rode an elevator two levels deeper into the underground. The Alley was quiet at night. He passed no one in the sea-green lower-level hallways. There was only the sound of his footsteps and the chime of the transponder in his ID tag as he crossed into restricted areas. Mirrored doors offered him unwelcome reminders of his age — he had turned forty-eight last January — the creeping curvature of his spine, the paunch that ballooned over his belt buckle. A fringe of gray hair stood out against his dark skin. His father had been a light-skinned Englishman, taken by cancer twenty years ago; his mother, a Sudanese immigrant and Sufi scholar, had survived him by less than a year. Charlie resembled his father more than ever these days.