Cryptonomicon

"You have your own company or something?" Amy says weakly.

"No. After Randy and Avi left town, I dropped out of college and snagged a job with a local company, which I still have," Chester says.

The front door, a translucent crystal slab on a track, slides open. Randy and Amy follow Chester into his house. As advertised, there is a fullscale steam locomotive in the foyer.

"The house is patterned after flex-space," Chester says.

"What's that?" Amy asks. She is completely turned off by the locomotive.

"A lot of high-tech companies get started in flex-space, which just means a big warehouse with no internal walls or partitions--just a few pillars to hold up the ceiling. You can drag partitions around to divide it up into rooms."

"Like cubicles?"

"Same idea, but the partitions go up higher so you have a feeling of being in a real room. Of course, they don't go all the way up to the ceiling. Otherwise, there wouldn't be room for the TWA."

"The what?" Amy asks. Chester, who is leading them into the maze of partitions, answers the question by tilting his head back and looking straight up.

The roof of the house is made entirely of glass, held up by a trusswork of white painted steel tubes. It is maybe forty or fifty feet above the floor. The partitions rise to a height of maybe twelve feet. In the gap above the partitions and below the ceiling, a grid has been constructed, a scaffolding of red pipes, nearly as vast as the house itself. Thousands, millions, of aluminum shreds are trapped in that space grid, like tom tufts caught in a three-dimensional screen. It looks like an artillery shell the length of a football field that has exploded into shrapnel a microsecond ago and been frozen in place; light filters through the metal scraps, trickles down bundles of shredded wiring and glances flatly off the crusts of melted and hardened upholstery. It is so vast and so close that when Amy and Randy first look up at it they flinch, expecting it to fall on them. Randy already knows what it is. But Amy has to stare at it for a long time, and prowl from room to room, viewing it from different angles, before it takes shape in her mind, and becomes recognizable as something familiar: a 747.

"The FAA and NTSB were surprisingly cool about it," Chester muses. "Which makes sense. I mean, they've reconstructed this thing in a hangar, right? Dredged up all the pieces, figured out where they go, and hung them on this grid. They've gone over it and gathered all the forensic evidence they could find, hosed out all the human remains and disposed of them properly, sterilized the debris so that the crash investigation team doesn't have to worry about getting AIDS from touching a bloody flange or something. And they're done with it. And they're paying like rent on this hangar. They can't throw it away. They have to store it somewhere. So all I had to do was get the house certified as a federal warehouse, which was a pretty easy legal hack. And if there's a lawsuit, I have to let the lawyers in to go over it. But really it was not a problem to do this. The Boeing guys love it, they're over here all the time."

"It's like a resource to them," Randy guesses.

"Yeah."

"You like to play that role."

"Sure! I have defined a privilege constellation specifically for engineer types who can come here anytime they want to access the house as a museum of dead tech. That's what I mean by the flex space analogy. To me and my guests, it's a home. To these visitors . . . there's one right there." Chester waves his arm across the room (it is a central room maybe fifty meters on a side) at an engineer type who has set up a Hasselblad on a huge tripod and is pointing it straight up at a bent landing gear strut ". . . to them it's exactly like a museum in that there are places they can go and other places that if they step over the line will set off alarms and get them in trouble."

"Is there a gift shop?" Amy jokes.

"The gift shop is roughed in, but not up and running--the LOHO throws up all kinds of impediments," Chester grumbles.