My face unravels with disapproval. “Why me?”
He leads me through a nearby door. Suddenly, I’m staring at an endless row of servers.
Chuckling, he says, “You’d be surprised how much space it takes for one minute of dialogue.”
The storage room is circular, about a quarter-mile from where I’m standing, and beyond that there's a long, polished wall. If I squint, I can make out another door at the other end.
I step forward and hold on to the safety bar as I meander down the stairs. A small bay in the middle is filled with shelves and cabinets containing hundreds of computers and boxes of cables. If I had more time, I m
ight search through them, but that’s not the case.
A swath of red, blinking lights shines over Elon’s face. “Earth Federation has scoured the cosmos. We have sent our best and brightest to the outer edges of the universe, mild efforts made to understand ourselves better,” he says.
“We are humans. Exploration is in our DNA,” I say.
He laughs, knowingly. “All that searching, and you know what it amounted to?”
I swallow, hoping a witty reply will pop into my brain before thinking of me as a complete idiot, unfit for the job at hand, whatever the job may be.
Luckily, he answers before I can respond.
“Data,” he says. “An unlimited amount of it. So much of it, in fact, that we didn’t at first know what to do with it.”
I inch back. “You’ve been mining their stories,” I mutter.
Elon grins and watches the servers tick. Deep breath in. Deep breath out.
This is his kingdom. The rest of us are just serfs tending to his land.
“Every interaction. Every minor encounter. All of it has been logged and stored in a cloud database I designed myself,” he says. “A simulation, if you must call it something.”
I snort with laughter, surprised it isn’t something a little more… diabolic. A simulation doesn’t seem too harmful. I can work with that.
“You still haven’t answered my question. Why me?” I ask.
He licks his lower lip and rumples his forehead in thought. “We go a long way back,” he says. “You’re a great coder, Ava. I need your opinion.”
He motions for me to follow him through the complex maze of servers.
The building is buzzing with electricity. He taps on a few servers, and they all light up as we pass by their metallic casings. He pauses as we reach the door.
“This is about my father, isn’t it?” I ask. “You feel bad for me because he died.”
His grin fades. “Your father was a prick, Ava. You’re better off without him,” he says.
I chuckle. A little dark humor is exactly what I need right now. “Well, you’re right about that.”
“Want to see what’s on the other side?” he asks.
Yes. Of course, I do. But I’m not sure how much use I’ll be to him.
“This is leagues above my pay-grade, Elon. I don’t have the know-how to code this type of technology,” I say. “Why don’t you tell me the real reason you brought me here?”
He lowers his voice. “Look, I’m not in this to thrill any big investors. The board thinks this is another seasonal product, but I didn’t build this to make more money. I’ve got enough as it is,” he says.
“Then why?” I ask.
“To provide people insight.”