He detoured through the O/BEC gallery — though, like “staying late,” it was probably wrong to call it a “detour.” This was one of the stations of his habitual nightly walk.

The gallery was constructed like a surgical theater without the student seating, a ring-shaped tiled hallway fitted with sealed glass windows on its inner perimeter. The windows overlooked a circular chamber forty feet deep. At the bottom of the chamber, serviced by columns of supercooled gases and bundles of light pipes and monitoring devices, were the three huge O/BEC platens. Inside each tubular platen were rank upon rank of microscopically thin gallium arsenide wafers, bathed in helium at a temperature of -451° Fahrenheit.

Charlie was an engineer, not a physicist. He could maintain the machines that maintained the platens, but his understanding of the fundamental process at work was partial at best. A “Bose-Einstein Condensate” was a highly ordered state of matter, and the BECs created linked electron particles called “excitons,” and excitons functioned as quantum gates to form an absurdly fast and subtle computing device. Anything beyond that Reader’s Digest sketch he left to the intense and socially awkward young theorists and graduate students who cycled through Eyeball Alley as if it were a summer resort. Charlie’s job was more practical: he kept it all working, kept it cool, kept the I/O smooth, fixed little problems before they became big problems.

Tonight there were four maintenance guys in sterile suits down in the plumbing, probably Stitch and Chavez and the new hands cycling through from Berkeley Lab. More people than usual… he wondered if Anne Costigan had ordered some unscheduled work.

He walked the circumference of the gallery once, then followed another corridor past the solid-state physics labs to the data control room. Charlie knew as soon as he stepped inside that something was up.