Read Online Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff - Free Book Online Page A

Mr. Pouty over there is his brother Irwin.”
    Irwin, still standing a good ten paces back from the rest of us, didn’t try to shake Penny’s hand or even nod hello. He was sulking.
    â€œNow that you’ve met everybody,” Julie continued, “why don’t we all go back to the Big Tent and show you the system? You can try out one of our demos to get a better idea of what you’ll be working on.”
    â€œOK,” Penny agreed. She said it like it was actually the last thing in the world she wanted to do, but she let Julie take her elbow and lead her just the same, with only one last wistful glance back at the door she’d come in by.
    The Big Tent, as its name suggested, was the largest tent in the Factory. It was set up in the shed’s south end, oriented diagonally to the shed walls—the only way it would fit between the support pillars. Originally it was an army mess tent, but we had painted it to look like a circus big top (or actually, I had painted it, after Julie and Irwin made a halfhearted start; red and white stripes get boring pretty quickly). It housed the majority of the Factory’s equipment, including a bank of networked computer-graphics workstations that Julie’s uncle had picked up off the street after they’d fallen from the back of a truck.
    The Big Tent was as cluttered as my bedroom and as messy as the shed itself had once been. But there were levels of disorder, and as we came in I thought I saw the reason for Julie’s spat with Irwin: overnight, one of the workstations had been gutted, its parts spread out across a worktable. This happened all the time—Irwin was constantly taking one or another of the computers offline, taking it apart and reconfiguring it to squeeze out an extra ounce of performance—but having one of the machines down could cause problems with the rest of the network, especially when we were running a demo. So either Julie had forgotten to tell Irwin she’d be needing the full system today, or, more likely, he hadn’t listened.
    The sight of all the hardware in the tent triggered another odd reaction from Penny. She pulled her arm loose from Julie’s grasp, went over to the worktable, and made a very authoritative-sounding observation about the collection of computer parts. I couldn’t really understand what she said—she used the techno-dialect that ex-employees of Bit Warehouse are supposed to be fluent in, but which I’d never learned—but it impressed Irwin enough to bring him partway out of his sulk.
    â€œThat’s right,” he told her. “Have you worked with one of these before?”
    Instead of answering, Penny examined the other two workstations, the ones that hadn’t been taken apart. She ran her thumb over a rough spot on one computer’s plastic-and-metal shell. “Did you sand off the brand names?” she asked.
    â€œThey came that way,” Julie spoke up. “Part of a special deal.”
    â€œYeah,” Adam said. “Ninety percent off, with no serial numbers…”
    â€œBe quiet.”
    Penny was staring at me.
    â€œOops,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean you.”
    â€œAndrew hears voices in his head,” Dennis explained, smirking. “He’s got family up there.”
    â€œFamily…?”
    â€œIt’s complicated,” said Julie. She shot a warning glance at Dennis. “Andrew will explain it to you himself, if he feels like it.”
    I definitely didn’t feel like it, not just then. “So,” I said, hoping to change the subject, “what demo are we going to run?”
    Dennis sat down at a computer terminal and punched a few keys. “What about Dancing Cripples?” he suggested. “You like that one.”
    Dancing Cripples was a demo version of the application Julie had dreamed up to pique my interest back when I’d first tried Eidolon—the application that a