Days 11-16 (Disappointment)

For once, he wasn't disappointed. The drive was relatively short,
the traffic at this hour had nearly evaporated, and the day
continued to be bright and clear. Grant wondered if everything
seemed so suddenly alive merely in comparison to the
Disappointment Machine. The damn thing had seemed like a
near-death experience, even in retrospect.

He'd been to this particular hospital before, though not as a
patient, and so when he went to the front desk and showed his
press credentials to the person working there, he already knew
he'd be directed to their public affairs office. In this, he was
also not disappointed - the tired but friendly worker looked over
his papers and pointed him towards room 128.

The nameplate by 128 declared it to be the domain of Ellen
MacKenzie, MBA, Chief of Public Affairs. Grant smiled; when you
job was to go around the city talking to as many different people
as you possibly could, it was nice every now and then to speak to
someone you were at least vaguely familiar with. Ellen had been
his contact here at the hospital since he'd started his job. He
knocked on the door.

It was opened promptly by a woman speaking in hurried tones into
a wireless headset. ``Yes, Dr. Forshee, I assure you, if we see
any more cases we'll get the information about the distributors
to you.'' She glanced up, saw Grant, and waved him into the
office as she retreated back to her desk. ``Thanks again.'' she
added perfunctorily.

Grant sat across from her and looked over her books, out the
window, anywhere to indicate he wasn't listening in on her
conversation. She took her headset off and pressed a button on
the cellphone she had at her hip.

``If you're doing a story about this outbreak,'' she began
seriously, ``you're going to have to come back later. I'm going
to have to get a good night's sleep before I issue any press
releases. If I'm lucky, the USDA will beat me to it.''

``Sounds serious.'' he said noncommittally. This wouldn't have
been the first time he'd gone to interview someone and gotten a
completely different story instead.

Ellen breathed a sigh of relief. ``So this is the first you've
heard of it, good.'' The downside to interviewing someone who was
familiar with you was that they learned to recognize the
statements you used when you had no idea what was going on. ``
There's been a few cases of E. Coli, we suspect there's going to
have to be a recall, and hopefully we won't see anymore and
they're isolated incidents and Dr. Forshee can handle it.'' She
interrupted Grant before he could say anything, ``And yes, if
it's more major I'll keep you in the loop.''

``Thanks.'' was the only reply he could think of. Ellen's mind
worked a mile a minute - from what little he'd seen, it had to -
and it was difficult sometimes for him to keep up. His mind was
always trying to fit things into a story, which was handy when he
was actually working on a story, but not so when he was trying to
simply listen.

``So.'' she said, having regained some measure of composure, ``
What does bring you to my office, then?''

``Ah,'' he replied. He needed to work on his attention span, he
reflected. He got sidetracked too easily. ``I'm doing a story on
people injured during the outage. Your hospital admitted a man
named Dr. James Caster two days ago.''

Ellen nodded and began typing on her computer. ``The name rings a
bell. There were two, maybe three fatalities due to that outage,
I think they were all vehicle related.'' She smiled as the
machine fetched Caster's records. ``Yes, there he is. Severe
trauma from the accident, blood loss, swelling in the brain-''
Grant knew she was purposefully keeping the jargon out of her
summary, and mentally thanked her for it. ``He died early the
next morning.''

``I've been reading the police report,'' among other things, he
added silently, ``and it says he refused treatment?''

MacKenzie had already been paging through the files while Grant
talked. She frowned at the screen. ``He did. All that damage, and
he was still conscious when we got him here. I do remember him
now, one of the on-duty doctors filled me in the next morning.
Caster wanted to see his lawyer, didn't want to be operated on or
anything until the man arrived.''

``His lawyer?'' Grant's notepad and pen had seemingly appeared
out of nowhere as he started writing. ``Did he say why?''

Ellen had paused, thinking about how best to phrase her next
statements. ``If you want the honest truth, Grant? And this is
off-record: I think he knew he wasn't going to make it. He was
probably getting his will set.''

Grant had obligingly stopped writing. ``Do you know if he did?''

She shrugged. ``I have no idea. Once the lawyer left, he gave his
consent to operate and we did what he could. We didn't ask.''

Grant stood up, ``Thanks Ellen, that's all I need.'' He shook her
hand, as he had every time he'd been here, and left. Behind him,
he could hear her start dialing another set of numbers and
speaking into her headset. There had been a time, when he'd first
started this job, when he'd though about asking her on a date.
They had, after all, gotten along fairly well, and he wouldn't,
by a long shot, be the first journalist to transition from
business to the casual. Then he'd realized the kind of hours she
put in at the hospital and the fact that she literally had no
free time. He couldn't compete with her schedule then, he
reflected as he walked away, hearing her voice dwindle, and he
definitely couldn't now. Besides, he had a date tonight.

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Day 10 (Disappointment)

That morning, he'd almost managed to convince himself that he
didn't really need to talk to VonCannon. After all, he'd only
been mentioned once, in passing, and they'd had a falling out.
Whatever the old professor had to say about Caster was probably
not complimentary enough to put in a story anyway. So it had been
with a relatively relieved mind that he'd set out interviewing
people who were more likely to give him useful information.

Dean Howard had done that, at least in the form of James'
personnel file. It had most of the biographic information that
the reporter had been seeking, for one. So it should have been
hard to be annoyed at Howard, but as Grant drove back downtown
toward an industrial center he'd already visited more times than
he'd have liked to, he found it quite easy.

Professor Malachai VonCannon. Resigned just shy of a dozen years
ago under far more suspicious conditions than Caster would later
find himself leaving. He'd had a very colorful history and even
while employed he had been somewhat of a pariah. The most
important part of the ex-professor's file, however, was the
address of a warehouse in a certain industrial area of the city.
Grant knew it probably hadn't been exactly ethical to ask for
VonCannon's file in addition to the late James Caster, but given
the current administration's willingness to put the incidents
behind them and never mention them again, it seemed unlikely
they'd miss it. He'd glanced through it as he walked back to his
vehicle, and he was sorely tempted to do so again on the many
occasions he found himself stopped upon re-entering the city.
That, he knew from experience, would lead to him forgetting to
stop reading and irate drivers honking at him for ignoring green
lights.

This was perhaps the only time in his long history of driving
into the city that he found himself hoping for worse traffic than
usual. When he'd first met Malachai, the man had seemed tired and
irate, and Grant hadn't even really wanted anything from him
then. He couldn't imagine that attempting an interview would
improve anyone's mood, much less someone who was annoyed to begin
with.

That settled it, then, he rationalized. He would go to the
warehouse, try and fail to talk to VonCannon, and then go into
the office and write this damn story already.

The warehouse squatted before him, looking even more decrepit
than when he'd first visited if such a thing were possible. Grant
knew that this perception was probably more in his mind than
reality, but it didn't stop the feeling of dread from returning.
He got out of his car, noting that once more his was the only
other vehicle parked outside the building, and knocked on the
entrance door.

There was no response. He found himself flooded with mixed
relief. Mixed, of course, because the doctor's absence meant that
he'd have to come back later.

``You again?'' While Grant had been distracted, the door had
opened, and the old man from the previous day was standing there
looking as irate now as he had seemed then. ``I don't know if I
was clear last time; this isn't actually a recycling center. This
is a private place of business.''

``Yes, of course.'' The reporter decided he'd have to handle this
very carefully. ``I'm actually here on business today. My name's
Grant Wynn and I'm a reporter with the Gazette.''

At first he wondered if VonCannon wasn't hard of hearing, because
the man didn't seem to respond to that statement at all. Finally,
the ex-professor spoke up. ``That's very well, but so what?''

``I'm writing a story about Dr. James Caster, and-''

``He's dead, you know.'' VonCannon interrupted abruptly. ``If
you're having trouble finding him, that's probably why.''

In reality, Grant was just relieved he wasn't going to have to
break the news to yet another person. He found the professor's
sudden revelation to be unnerving, though.

``Actually, that's why I'm writing the story, we're doing a part
on people injured in the outage.''

Malachai again seemed unresponsive, then spoke up just as
abruptly as he had before. ``Okay then, come in.''

Once again Grant found himself transitioning from a world flooded
with light to a world with only patches. He tried to stay as
close to the doctor as he could without being uncomfortably
close. For his part, VonCannon didn't seem to notice his presence
at all once they'd gone inside, instead walking sedately toward
the back of the warehouse.

``Tell me,'' the man could spring from utter silence to
conversation in a fraction of a second. ``what you know about
Doctor Caster's work.''

Grant wasn't sure how he was supposed to reply. ``Not a lot, just
what the interviews told me.'' he thought back to his interview
with James' co-workers, but wasn't about to tell the professor
about Caster's troubles of late.

``Does this look familiar, then?'' They'd reached a pool of light
whose sole purpose was to illuminate a shoddy card table. The
table was a masterpiece of both engineering and fashionable
design compared to the object on top of it.

It was hard for Grant to even look at. It seemed to be very old,
but not in a preserved way. Rather, it looked as though someone
had gone to a battlefield and dug until they hit something,
denting it in the process, and took that something directly home
without bothering to clean it. It had once been a box, probably
metal, but rust and other less identifiable corrosions had eroded
most of its original materials. Color-coded wires dangled
pointlessly from parts of it, their insulation wearing in some
places and stripped from others. There was a row of tiny red
lights at the bottom, most of which were burnt out. One was
physically broken altogether. Those that were working emitted a
feeble, flickering light. It growled some sort of noise that
should have been a low hum, but instead indicated that the
machine's humming days were long behind it, and now perhaps a
dull 'thunk' might suffice.

Grant knew, intellectually, that Doctor VonCannon was an
intelligent man. He had the look of a mad scientist about him,
there was definitely that. The reporter had read his file and in
it, it was indicated that before he'd gone off the deep end, the
professor had done some impressive things. So to see such a
horribly constructed device and to know what the professor was
capable of, well, it was just....

``What is that horrible thing?'' Wynn found himself sputtering
without even thinking of it. His professionalism, he realized
with growing dismay, had deserted him in the face of such a
poorly constructed device.

``You expected something a little fancier?'' VonCannon said.

Grant nodded vigorously. He'd driven all this way - twice - gone
through all this trouble for a story and now he had to look at
this... thing. Disappointing. That's what it was. The whole
machine was just disappointing.

Realization dawned on him, then, and Malachai saw it. ``Ah-ha!''
he said, with less delight than it seemed he should have. ``You
do know what this is. Caster was working on it, and somebody told
you!'' The professor's features looked almost delighted, then
sunk into dejectedness. ``I should be happy someone's replicated
my work, but I can't. Let's get away from this damned thing.''
Without looking to see if Grant followed, he started walking
further toward the back of the workshop.

Grant tore his fascinated yet horrified gaze away from the
machine and followed VonCannon, his thought processes clearing
the further he walked. ``Wait, what the hell is that?''

``Isn't it obvious?'' Malachai responded without looking back. ``
It's a Disappointment Machine.''

This confirmed Grant's realization, that Dr. Caster had indeed
been trying to work on the same thing Dr. VonCannon had. If he'd
copied that machine well, Grant shuddered to think what the
effect it'd had on the late doctor's co-workers. No wonder people
had begun to think he'd lost it.

``I got a message,'' they had reached the area illuminated by a
floodlight, which revealed a modest work area complete with desk
and somewhat vintage computer, ``the night that Doctor Caster was
killed. He called me, trying to make amends, claiming he had
replicated one of my experiments. I thought it some kind of
trick, but when I tried to reach him the next day, he was nowhere
to be found. My lawyer was the one who ended up breaking the
news.''

Grant just blinked at this. His ability to ask leading questions
and get to the bottom of a story had fled him along with his
professionalism. Thankfully, VonCannon appeared willing to talk
without prodding.

``We have the same lawyer,'' The professor clarified, ``James and
I. I retained him when I thought I might need a tenure hearing,
and so later when Doctor Caster was in much the same position, I
recommended him. I called yesterday to ask if he'd been the
recipient of any strange messages, and to see if I couldn't get
ahold of James through an intermediary. So you see, this is how I
know. It seems strange to me that after a half-dozen years of
animosity, he would come back, and on that night of his return,
he would die.''

``I know what you mean.'' Grant found himself saying, and
immediately regretting. One of the first rules of his profession
was that he wasn't supposed to get involved. Find out what was
going on, do whatever good could be done by reporting it, and get
out. He wasn't supposed to commiserate with VonCannon, that was
for certain. In fact, despite having got a great deal of
information from the man, he wasn't sure if any of it was
something he could use in his story.

``You are a journalist, yes? A reporter?'' VonCannon was looking
fully at Grant now. His gaze had up until this point been
wavering and disinterested. Grant wasn't sure he liked the
change.

``Yes.'' he said somewhat unsteadily.

``I suppose you have a card of some sort, with contact
information, that sort of thing?''

Grant fumbled in his wallet and found one. He handed it over to
VonCannon and even managed to do so without shaking. His
composure was returning, bit by bit, but he found himself hoping
greatly that he could leave this place as soon as possible.

VonCannon nodded and his piercing gaze went elsewhere. ``Good,
thank you. I must do some very heavy thinking. You may hear from
me again. I assume you can find your own way out?''

Grant wanted to answer with ``not really'', given he wasn't sure
which of the pools of light was the door and which held horrible
machines that made him almost physically ill, but he wanted more
to just be out of the place. So he replied with ``Sure.'' and
left the building as quickly as he could without actually
running.

He practically burst out the front door and took a deep breath.
As the door closed behind him and he took in the sun, he found
himself realizing that he'd never thought a downtown industrial
slum could look so good. The warehouse, for all its openness, was
entirely too claustrophobic for him.

He had one more stop, he knew, but after this talking to people
at a hospital would be easy.

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Day 9 (Disappointment)

RECYCLING
----

Municipal Recyling Center

(651)-555-2048

1151 West 18th

----

Sandys Hardware Recycling

(651)-555-8192

1024 West 16th

``For all your computer recycling needs''

M-F, 8:00am - 6:30pm

---

Vasko Solid Waste, Inc.

309 Como Avenue

Hours: Mon.-Fri. 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sat. 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Closed Sundays and holidays.

5 Disappointment

Meeting Rose at 6:30 meant that he'd have to cut his work day
shorter. This didn't mean he had to work less, unfortunately, it
meant he would have to get up earlier. So it was 8:00 am the next
morning when Grant awoke, groggily shambled over to his alarm
clock to shut it off, and tried to remember what he was doing
awake at what to him was an entirely godforsaken early hour. It
took him halfway through his shower to recall: He was meeting
Rosetta later that day.

Completely, entirely worth it.

He'd have to get moving if he wanted to get everything done
today. His first stop was the university to try and locate old
colleagues.

Finding academics used to be easier; once they were awarded
tenure, they tended not to move around much. More recently,
though, industry had become an increasingly attractive choice. As
Grant drove he found himself hoping that there was someone at the
place who remembered Caster. He also found himself thinking of
VonCannon. The latter would, if the hints he'd heard dropped so
far, be more difficult to locate. As far as Wynn could tell, his
GPS was functioning perfectly today, which meant that if he put
in the location of Rosetta's shop, he'd actually end up there
instead of at the old professor's warehouse. This was good news
for later in the day when his date would commence, but bad news
for slightly earlier than that when he'd need to talk to
VonCannon. He was hoping what he'd get at the university would be
enough information.

What he got at the university turned out to be a headache.
Parking was, as he well knew from his time there, poor. When he
considered it, which given the long walk from the only visitor's
parking structure he had plenty of time to do, ``poor'' was
somewhat of an understatement. He never understood why people who
were visiting the college - potential students, parents of
poential students, potential faculty especially - should have to
park so far away. Maybe less traffic encouraged a more
'residential' campus or something, but he thought it encouraged
people to go back home.

Just like when he'd originally attended college here, however, he
had no choice. He had only a vague idea of the engineering hall's
location, which didn't help his search. He'd only been there for
the few mandatory science classes early on in his college career.

Approximately ten minutes later, to help matters, he discovered
that the building he'd originally thought was for engineering
was, in fact, the Chemistry building. Eventually he tried that
last resort of lost people everywhere, asking a student. This
earned him a somewhat strange look, but thankfully clear
directions.

Another ten minutes passed before he found himself at the main
entrance to the Ashley J. Wilson Hall of Engineering. He checked
his appearance in the glass doors and took a moment to briefly
tidy himself up. He tried to appear professional at all times,
meaning he tried to look like a newspaper reporter ought to look.
When interviewing people in a bar as he had the night before, for
instance, he'd not had to change his appareance at all. This was
the reason he usually suggested casual locations for his
interviews. In this case, though, he hadn't had the time to call
ahead. Given this, his time constraints, and the fact that there
were probably research assistants older than him here, he'd made
an effort to appear actually professional today. If Anders - or
anyone else from the office for that matter - saw him dressed up
like this, they'd be pressed not to burst out laughing.

He entered the building and smiled somewhat realizing it was
probably the first time he'd done so. There was a cork bulletin
board hanging up on one of the walls, next to the entrance to a
computer lab and across form an auditorium. He went over to the
board both to look as though he belonged there and also to find
where the dean's office - or at least someone who could direct
him somewhere - was. Fortunately for him there was a rather
tattered-looking floor plan in the upper-left and it only took
him another few minutes to make sense of it.

After all this trouble, he expected to not find the dean in at
all, and was pleasantly surprised when he asked the assistant at
the desk in front of the door reading ``Guy Howard, Dean of
Engineering'' where he might locate Dr. Howard.

``Right behind you.'' she smirked.

The person who'd entered the room after Grant smiled. ``I'm Dean
Howard, can I help you?''

Grant gave his usual speil: ``Grant Wynn, reporter for the
Gazette, do you have some spare time?''

``Not really.'' Howard said honestly. ``But since my office hours
don't begin for another half hour, I'll give you what I can. Come
on in.'' he said, moving to his office.

The dean's office was far more cramped than Grant would have
expected a dean's office to be. Most of that, he imagined, was
the effect of the books: Every available vertical surface had a
bookshelf propped up against it, and every shelf was filled with
books on structural, electrical, civil, computer, metal,
software, mechanical, aerospace, or nuclear engineering. What
wasn't filled with books was stacked with magazines, and what
surfaces didn't have a magazine were hosting a computer or
scattered papers. He considered himself lucky to find a chair.

Howard himself had to pick a book or two up off of his, placing
them on top of his computer tower. ``So,'' he said when he'd made
a spot for himself and sat in it, ``what kind of story is this?''

``I'd just like to ask about James Caster.'' Grant began.

Guy's face darkened. ``My predecessor, yes. I'm not sure how I
can be of any help, really, all that was sorted out years ago.''

Oh hell, Grant thought. Not again. ``I'm sorry to be the one to
have to tell you, but he died in an accident during the outage
this weekend.''

``Oh.'' Howard looked almost relieved. ``I'm sorry to hear it.''

``I'm just asking about him, trying to put some things together
for a story.''

``You do know,'' the dean asked cautiously, ``about the rather...
suspicious circumstances under which he left, yes?''

``I spoke to Vervicom yesterday.'' Grant said. In a story like
this, the odd parts like Caster's defection and dual-payment were
usually the ones that got him interested, but he felt himself
wanting, uncharacteristically, to get past that part. It was as
though his will alone could make this a normal story, after which
he could get on with his career. The more he heard of it, the
more he doubted.

Howard looked relieved again, nearly sagging back into his chair.
``Good good, hate to relive that. Bad times, bad times, almost as
bad as that whole time machine thing.''

Grant blinked. ``Excuse me?''

The dean seemed to realize the preposterousness of what he'd just
said. ``Not a literal time machine, of course. Well, the
respectable bunch of us didn't think so, at least.''

This wasn't on the topic of Dr. Caster, but he wasn't about to
let it go. ``When was this?'' Grant inquired in his best 'just
asking out of curiosity' voice.

Guy considered. ``Maybe a year or two before I got this job. We
had a professor who'd made a name for himself for some really
bizarre idea. I don't recall it exactly, it was a while back and
had a fad following for a while, something like a machine that
couldn't be moved - it was crazy but the math ended up working
out. He built one - one, I might add, that nobody ever saw - and
then went on to build the thing he called the time machine.''

``I assume he didn't take pictures of dinosaurs with it.'' Wynn
guessed.

``Not as such, no.'' The dean smiled at the idea. ``There weren't
any of us here who could figure out what it did do, granted, but
what it didn't do was travel through time. At least not any more
so than you or I. That wasn't the worst of it, though, the damn
thing kept pulling absurd amounts of power at irregular
intervals, it flooded the network, it killed fire-suppression
systems, made a general nuisance of itself. It was Doctor Caster
who ended up having to fire the guy. VonCannon didn't even seem
to take it very hard, he'd have to had expected it.''

``Sorry, what was that name again?'' Grant said. He shouldn't
have even been surprised at that point. For a recluse, the man
was suddenly sprouting up everywhere.

Dean Howard took a moment to consider. ``Yes, Malachai VonCannon.
I don't even know what department he was in, there probably
wasn't one willing to have him, but that was definiely the guy.''
He seemed to think a moment before realizing what he'd been
saying. ``I'm sorry, I've gotten us off on a tangent, and you
with so little time. My office hours are going to begin soon, and
I've got quite a bit to get caught up on as you can see. Tell
Tina at the desk to grab Dr. Caster's old file, use whatever you
want, it's all public.'' The man paused for a moment. ``I am
sorry to hear about James' death, please understand. It was a
hard time the university went though, his having to leave, but he
was a good man.''

Grant nodded his understanding, and left.

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