Magnetrons

‘The sleep will be there’ she stated curtly. Such was to be expected.

‘But the rooms, the open concept, and the sacred awning?’ he asked, not bothering to examine the tubes. And there, within the tubes themselves, there were waveguides. Everyone wanted and liked waveguides, except that one tenant down the hall.

‘Microwaves,’ he had once said, his expression relaying adamant concern, ‘are all over the place.’

‘And what of it?’ she asked. Her tone sunk and sprang into echoing waves, like so many times before. ‘It’s the unlock. Clearly you’re foreign.’ The lights struck at angles reflected by box-glass blending into lava-lamps, drawing upon her countenance a rip current of smoky red neon. ‘It’s open concept, obviously, and no matter how it’s connected, the waves never touch.’

‘Useless…’ he mused, eyes fixated on hers. The hallway dissolved, exposing bar codes and rescinded fragments of unsent waveguides. ‘Unless…?’ his query lingered, grew at once with spikes before atoning any mere sense of emotion. ‘The signal.’

‘Signals or channels? Make up your mind. Don’t have time for this,’ came her response, dull in comparison to what was seen in the faceless buildings, whose grim exteriors shed reticence in the presence of sunlight, anonymous rooms; piles of secondary paperwork and networking devices, all the implements of productivity at the disposal of the exigent. ‘It doesn’t matter, just take this,’ she said. She handed him a device, a tracker of some kind, or a weapon. It pulsed once, displayed chronographic readings, and seemed fit enough to be in the possession of a cartographer.

‘But what does it do?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never seen one like it.’

‘The maps are encrypted, second phase lithographic,’ she said. ‘You can solve it if you’d like, been trying for weeks. Some parts look like tails of propellant exhaust, others like heartbeats.’