Sudan Fibres

Speculative fiction: Part III of IV of the Detem Cycle: A golden thread isn’t always enough

I’d watched too many Westerns. Desert meant rattlesnakes. Maybe scorpions. Did Nevada have scorpions? I looked at the tire and told myself to think about that. The rental had a flat tire and a roadside assistance number. How long would it take them to get somebody out there to change the tire? Two hours? Did I have enough water?

I decided not to wait. I’d change the tire myself. Not because I really wanted to. I was charging by the day. I got paid either way. I decided to change it myself because the alternative was calling the rental company on my phone. I didn’t want to know if I had a signal.

I was stranded in the desert with a flat tire, surrounded by scorpions and rattlesnakes. The last thing I needed was no bars to tell me how isolated I was. I opened the trunk slowly, half expecting a snake to jump out. The idea was just absurd enough to shake me out of the mood. What would interest a scorpion or a rattlesnake? Not a flat tire. They couldn’t eat it.

I forced myself to pull the miniature tire out of the back without jerking it out with something. I knew there was no snake lurking under it, no matter what my Eastern mind was telling me. There probably wasn’t room anyway. There was barely room for the tools. They looked too small to do the job. Maybe they were toys put there for the driver to play with while he waited for the wrecker to show up.

I’d just started loosening the lug nuts when I spotted the truck. It was light blue, but I couldn’t tell much more about it. The heat distorted the view too much. I wondered how far away it was. Five miles? Two? Halfway to Utah? Maybe closer than I thought since I could actually see it getting bigger as it approached. I had time to loosen all the nuts and position the jack before it pulled to a stop behind me.

The rifle rack in his back window didn’t bother me the way it would in the East. There it was performative. There was no danger on West Virginia or Mississippi’s roads that required protection with a long gun. In the West, according to a Louis L’Amour western I once read, you needed at least a sidearm in case your horse threw you and your boot caught in the stirrup and you had to shoot it before it dragged you to death. I didn’t know that much about horses, but if I had one, I wouldn’t let him read Louis L’Amour.

The rancher, if that’s what he was, didn’t bring either weapon with him as he climbed out of his truck. That was a good sign. Maybe he meant we wouldn’t have to shoot the car.

“I have a full-sized jack in the back,” he said, eyeing the tinker toy tools I’d laid out behind the car.

He must have been going from one garage to another delivering the thing. I didn’t ask. He’d rolled it off the back and let it hit the ground with a clatter he didn’t seem to hear. He slid it under the rental and pumped a few times. The tire came up almost to waist level. I changed it without bending over. He let the car down and rolled the jack to the back of his truck. He hooked it to a cable and let a winch pull it back up.

“That’s a lot of stuff on one truck,” I said.

“We have to work on things,” he said. I took his word, since I didn’t know what the things were or who we were.

“Dry country,” I said. “This must be what Sudan feels like.”

I watched his eyes while I said it, but it was the same as with everyone else up and down the road. No reaction.

“I don’t think they can ranch there,” he said. I didn’t know if it was a reference to the land or to their abilities. “What brings you out this way?” he asked.

“Tourist,” I said. “Wanted to see the Valley of Fire.”

“It’s the other way,” he said.

“Yeah. We have more road signs in the East.”

Driving on the donut spare slowed me down. It took an hour and a half to get back to the airport and turn the car in. They gave me another one, but I couldn’t tell what made it different. I had the same problem with the contractor who met me downtown. He seemed like the same guy who’d briefed me in Crystal City. Maybe taller.

“I’m supposed to get an interim report from you,” he said as we sat down to eat. His tone implied that I should be intimidated, but I wasn’t sure why.

“Pretty much nothing,” I said, before taking a bite of my cheeseburger. I don’t know why Vegas has the best burgers, and I don’t know why burgers and fries are the best meals available there. Maybe because somewhere between the fake Elvises and the fake Eiffel Tower, the burgers are the only thing not trying to be something else.

“I’m going to need a more complete report than that,” he said. I was already subtracting the price of the meal from my per diem to see if I turned a profit on the burger.

“There isn’t anything else,” I said, between bites. “My full report will describe the instructions that came to me from your boss via my boss. It will describe how I carried out those instructions. It will describe by name or other information all the people in a random sample in the Las Vegas area who did not react to mentions of ‘Sudan Fibres.’ Then and only then will we get to the actual gist of the report.”

“Which is what?” he asked.

“That I found pretty much nothing,” I said. “I might add that the instructions, from your boss via my boss, didn’t leave me enough leeway to accomplish anything.” I pointed at the untouched order of fries sitting in front of him. “Are you going to eat those?” He wasn’t, but he pulled them further from me anyway.

“What do you suggest?” he said.

“Give me more information about what the phrase means and why it needs to be investigated, to begin with. As it stands right now, I’m thrashing. I’m thrashing on the government dime with your company taking two cents off the top.”

I almost felt sorry for him. He was trying to project a tough guy image, but he wasn’t in charge. Maybe he wasn’t allowed to tell me more. Maybe he didn’t know more. I got paid either way.

He ate a french fry, and the look on his face said he was either thinking about what to tell me or he was trying to figure out what it tasted like. Probably what to tell me. The fries were good, but pretty standard.

“You know our company looks for bugs, glitches, and flaws in smart systems, right?”

I just nodded. I was tempted to tell him that my company found them and fixed them, but we both knew why his outfit had hired us. I just nodded.

“We think a foreign agent is hacking into Sensitors somehow. They’re gaining access to everything that uses them.”

It took me a moment to remember that Sensitor was what the government - Defense, maybe - called the gadgets that were also known as detector-emitters or collector-sensors. Detems or Coll-Sens. I didn’t know enough about how they worked to know how they’d be hacked, but I knew that a lot of information flowed through them. Burglar alarms, research, even some musical applications. My first guess was they weren’t after the music.

“What are the indications that it’s happening?” I asked.

An actor ad libbing on stage has to wonder how far they can go before getting so far off script they affect the plot. One contractor sharing information with another has to think like that. The plot is knowing more than the other guy, paying him to do the work, and taking a cut before sharing the work with the people who ordered it. He needed to give me enough to do the work, but not enough that my contractor could take the work away from his. That would damage the plot.

“The flow of information in systems using the Sensitor has slowed,” he said.

“Slowed how? Not getting from the Detem . . . From the Sensitor as quickly?”

“I guess not slowed. Ebbed maybe. Like the volume has gone down on sounds they pick up, or the resolution on images.”

“If what you said a out the resolution of images applies, would it be the clarity of the sound that’s decreased? Like compressing music?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

Two questions, and I knew the issue better than he did. There’s a fork in the road in any investigation. If the information is wrong, is the subject wrong or lying? If the subject is wrong, what else are they wrong about?

“So why are we asking about Sudan Fibres?”

He looked off toward the jukebox in the corner. It was full-sized, and looked a lot like one from 75 years ago. The difference was the keypad took up thirty or forty times as much space as the actual circuitry. I wondered if he knew that.

“An agency we contract with got a reference to it in a monitored transmission. They think it’s what’s causing the Sensitor signals to deteriorate.”

“And what led to that conclusion?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Finally an admission of ignorance. “But I don’t think anyone does.” Ah. It’s not just him. “The agency said the Coll-Sens’ Sudan Fibres were failing. Maybe if we knew what Sudan Fibres were, we’d know why they were failing.”

“The agency? NSA?”

“No. They’re not allowed to monitor anything domestic. One of the others.”

One of the others that wasn’t allowed to monitor domestically? Somehow I didn’t find that reassuring.

There was a lot else he didn’t know, but nothing he admitted to. The report I sent to my boss, Eddie Kurtz, was mostly that. The people we’re working for don’t know what they want. They don’t know what the people they’re working for want. I could have made the report longer by including everything else they didn’t know, but I’d made my point.

A text came back fairly soon. “Will edit to final.” He would edit it down to a final report.

“More biho lying there,” I texted back. Billable hours, just lying there, waiting to be picked up.

“Freelance spec. Keep looking,” Eddie texted back.

Sudan Fibres was now a freelance project, on spec, without a client. Not exactly living dangerously, but it might be costly. Like if there hadn’t been a spare in he trunk, or the rancher hadn’t stopped.

It wasn’t just the name of the Detems themselves that varied. The devices that employed them did too. Entry Sentry was one of the companies using them for alarms systems. Yard Guard was another. C-Cure had a range of products, but they were all essentially the same.

On-line stores said “not currently available” or all of them. The security shop I visited in downtown Vegas had an empty spot near the biometric locks. The clerk caught me looking. I didn’t even have to ask.

“We can’t get them any more. The company that made the receptors in them went out of business.” He was somewhere between apologetic about not selling them and proud of himself for knowing the company was defunct.

“I guess nobody else makes them, huh? The receptors?”

He shrugged. “That’s just what they told me.” We talked a few more minutes, but not enough for me to figure out what that was and who they were. “Some kind of government thing,” he told me in summation.

“Did you sell a lot of them?” I asked.

“Every one I could get. Surprised for something so high end. Two grand for three of the C-Cures, but they’d cover close to an acre. Of course the price went up then that Hollywood guy started buying them. Carl something. He used them for some kind of camera setting.”

Carl something. Yeah, I’d run that through imdb. Luckily Eddie had heard of Carl Shuman, and was able to set me up with a meeting. Somebody knew somebody.

“He did some kind of government project with Detems,” Eddie said. “Now he does some kind of technical audiovisual stuff in LA. I don’t know what he does with the Detems. See if you can find out.”

Calling it a meeting meant expanding the meaning of meet to include two people being in the same place. We walked from an office to a parking lot to a soundstage while Carl talked. The detection part of the device could see, hear, or understand a variety of inputs and create a record of them. It could then emit a signal that told another Detem to do something specific with that record. In burglar alarm technology, one Detem told another to look for something and a program combined the records into a 3D image. Combined with an analysis of the sounds detected, the program could describe an intruder’s height, weight, level of stealthiness, and whether it was a cat.

“Did you start out using them in surveillance?” I asked him.

“No, my training was in converting the signal to audiovisual,” he said.

“For movies,?” I asked.

“No, I was on a classified project,” he said. “I didn’t drink the Kool-Aid or sign the NDA, but there’s no money in pissing off the people I was working for.”

The door we were walking toward had a red light above it the size of a tricycle’s back wheel. But next to that, duct-taped to he wall, was a screen with large purple letters on a green background: “Shuters in Use.”

“Shuters?”

“A play on my name,” he said. “One of the A/V applications I found.”

He opened the door as if the red light weren’t there. Inside were about 20 people with their statuses apparently defined by how far behind the camera they were. One of them glanced at us and made a note on a clipboard. Time of disturbance, maybe? In front of the camera a man in a red leotard was pointing what looked like a ray gun at a woman in a catsuit crouched on top of a vintage television set in a wooden cabinet. Carl pointed to what I recognized as a pair of Detems mounted on light stands.

“Any sound they pick up back here is excluded from the signal going into the camera. We could slam that door and it wouldn’t matter.”

“Not exactly detecting and emitting, then.”

“No. More like detecting and deleting. But I’m not renaming them De-Des,” he said. “They can have some effect on light and shadows as well, but the programming is more complicated. The sound and images are digital but tape and film quality. We could have done even more magic if the Feds hadn’t stepped in.”

“Are they regulated somehow? By the Feds, I mean.”

He pursed his lips and took in a deep breath, almost as if he were smelling the question.

“We’re at the borderline of hypothesis and paranoia here, you understand?” he said.

“I work for a subcontractor that reports to a contractor who can’t tell us which agency they report to,” I said, eliding the fact that the mission had changed and I was freelancing. “It’s hard to say what would seem unlikely to me.”

“OK. The signal from Detems, Sensitors, and Coll-Sens began deteriorating some time back. Information comes out slower and needs to be amplified before we can make a record. And from what rumors I can pick up, it’s happening to all of them. Burglar alarm systems that use them have had to be reprogrammed twice and the truly high-end applications like the Dream Lab may be out of business completely.”

“And the Feds?”

“That’s the hypothesis part. I don’t know who else would have the juice, the raw surveillance power, to attach to every Detem in the country. And other than a hack, I don’t know what would make them all slow down at the same time. Somebody is doing something with thousands of Detems, and collecting information from movies, dreams, home alarm systems, medical diagnoses, and God knows what else. There’s no telling what they could do with that kind of information.”

“And you don’t think it could be a foreign country doing it?” I asked.

“You get that every time we add another layer of speculation, we’re getting further from likelihood?”

“Go ahead.”

“If it’s not the Feds, why would they not have stopped whatever is going on? Would they let a foreign actor gather that much data from mostly private entities here?”

“I don’t have an answer for that,” I said. “Is there a possibility it’s something physical with the Detems?”

“What would make a hundred thousand of them change behavior at once? I can’t think of anything.”

“Is there anything to back up your hypotheses?” I asked. “That’s not intended as a challenge. It’s an honest question.”

The director had called “cut.” The woman in the catsuit had jumped off the television, which I now saw had a green screen where the picture tube would go. I wondered what they’d project on it in the final version.

“There’s nothing,” Carl said. We walked over to where the Detem rested on its stand. “The only physical fact we have is they’re all slowing down at the same time. And before you ask, they’re almost impossible to take apart. Nobody’s ever successfully reassembled one and had it work.” We were looking up a foot or so at the Detem. “You see those two wires coming out? They go into a pair of tiny jacks. Smaller than a 3mm headphone jack. The plugs are the only connection. There’s an adapter that can read the signal, and the only program at first was the alarm application. Everything else has been reverse engineered from that.”

“Could there have been a time bomb of some sort in the original alarm programming?” I asked.

“I thought of that, too. I paid a UCSD kid to take the code apart line by line,” Carl said. “I thought maybe it was planned obsolescence, a ploy to make us all buy new code. But first off she couldn’t find any date-related time bomb, and second, there’s nobody to sell the new code. The company’s not just out of business. It’s gone.”

“Gone to Sudan?”

“Huh?”

Despite the Hollywood trappings, the green screen, and the people in leotards, there was something real about the guy. Some people dream up the sound a ray gun will make and other people make it happen. I felt like he was one of the ones making it happen.

“Is there a place we can talk quietly for a few minutes?”

Now it was a meeting. I talked while he made coffee. The coffee was good. When I finished talking he looked at his coffee for maybe half a minute.

“So the tech world thinks it’s the government,” he said at last. “And the government thinks it’s China or somebody. And somebody who calls them Coll-Sens thinks it’s because something called Sudan Fibres are failing.”

“You summing it all that quickly makes me realize how little I know about this,” I said.

“I’m used to elevator pitches,” he said. “But that’s not everything we know. It’s just the thesis statement. Do I understand you don’t have a client on this?”

“Not at the moment,” I said.

“What’s your background? I mean, what expertise do you bring to the investigation?”

“Eddit Kurtz’s father hired me right out of college as a favor to my dad. My dad had been a state police investigator. Eddie somehow got it in his head that I had experience in investigations, so I’ve been his troubleshooter since his dad retired. I occasionally remind him that I was hired as a programmer/analyst, but he says his father knew what he was doing.”

“Scary how much sense that makes to me,” Carl said. “Tell your boss I’m willing to pay for a week of your company’s analysis. Strictly a business move. I’ll survive, but my group will take a hit if these things keep going bad.”

“How bad?” I asked.

“Most of the Detems are running at about three-quarters capacity. Most of the stuff you saw today will keep working down to about a half, maybe a third. I don’t know what information is being pulled out of them, but there are going to be diminishing returns if the devices are slowed down enough that they’re no longer gathering it. The slowdown has to stop at some point or it’s counter-productive.”

“Unless part of it’s unplanned,” I said.

“How so?” Carl asked.

“Suppose the - let’s call it the entity - doesn’t know what’s happening. They targeted one set of Detems and it somehow spread to them all. Or they wanted to only eat away at ten percent of the capacity and there was a bug in it.”

“Not just a virus or a worm,” Carl said. “But an unintentional one. You know, some cops will tell you it’s harder to catch a crazy criminal because there’s no rubric for figuring out what he’s going to do next. This could be some kind of thing nobody planned. It almost sounds like your Sudan Fibres could be key. If you figure out that that is, it could tell you the story. ”

Carl gave me the contact information for the wholesalers he’d worked with. So far as they knew Sudan was a country in either Africa or South America. One of them was able to refer me to a tool and die shop in Virginia. It seemed an unlikely spot to find about a worldwide technology breach, but it was all I had at the time.

All I had to go on was a road number and a name, Monty’s Machine Shop, so GPS was only a little help. I got off the interstate at a truck stop the size of a small town and followed the road in question as it seemed to lose a lane every few miles. I went past the sign advertising “No Turnaround Past This Point,” but I was reluctant. There were three miles of curves, rises, hairpins, and dips after that, but it seemed like more. The shop was a cinderblock building in the center with metal shell buildings off to either side. I’d called ahead, and the owner came out to greet me.

“Are you Monty?” I asked.

“No. I’m Buck. We bought the place from Monty but kept the name. You want a look around?”

“Sure, that’d be great. I’m glad I didn’t meet that thing driving in,” I said, pointing at a long panel truck with the company’s name on the side.

“Did you come over from the truck stop?” he asked. I said I did. “Take a right when you leave. It’s quicker.”

The building he took me into was full of the sounds of metal being banged, beaten, and bent, with the roof apparently designed to echo each one. Buck bellowed above the noise to tell me what each bench and each sound was. After ten minutes or so, he mercifully took me to an office in the main building. Carl’s coffee was better, but the couch was comfortable.

“You wanted to ask about the wire we drew for TZ, is that right?”

“I think so. When you say drawing wire, that’s the part you showed me where they’re pulling metal through the hole in . . . I think you called it a drop-plate?”

“Drawplate,” he said. I was able to pick it out of his mountain accent easier without the metal noises as background. But wire had been “wahr,” so I had to pay close attention. “That wire we made for TZ was so fine we almost couldn’t drill a hole small enough for what they wanted. But that metal held together better than anything I’ve ever seen. I wish we could have had more of it.”

“What made it so special?” I asked.

“Ductile strength. I didn’t like the name they gave it, but I was almost ready to agree with them. I wish we’d had more to work with.”

“What did they call it?” I asked.

“Holy Gold. I don’t like taking the Lord’s name in vain.” Well, then, neither do I, I didn’t say. “What we got here was like a rock. It’s amazing how heavy it is. We had two chunks of it, one about 60 pounds, the other maybe two thirds of that. They would have fit in a stewpot. It was crude, like it had just been mined like that, but it was almost pure. TZ sent us a couple of the things, what he called EarEyes. Apparently they couldn’t be made without the special gold.”

“What did you do with them?” I asked. “The ones you got.”

“An old boy that worked here farted around with one of them and found out a way to guess the purity of metal by measuring its harmonics” Buck said. “He’d started out just trying to use it to tune a guitar. But the band he was with got a contract at a club in D.C. and he left the company. I think he took it with him. We never had any real use for it. We never buy foreign metal.”

I guessed that meant he didn’t need to test the harmonics. I may have been a little out of my depth.

“So your shop just made the wire. Did you ever call it thread, or fiber?”

“Just wire,” he said, with what sounded like pity.

“And TZ. That was who made the EarEyes?”

“TZ Wiel,” Buck said. “His family had a factory down around Bristol that made some kind of machinery for one of the drug companies. They started up a new production line to build the things, but it only lasted a year.”

“That was because they couldn’t get the gold wire?”

“That’s right. Turned out it really was fine as frog hair.” He acted like it was the funniest thing anybody had ever said. I laughed with him as if I understood the joke.

“Have you heard anything about the things not working as well as they did?”

“If they don’t, it’s not because of our wire.”

I didn’t learn much else. I turned right when I left the shop. The main state highway through that area was half a mile away. It took me to the interstate and that took me to Bristol. TZ wasn’t hard to find. Easier than Monty’s Machine Shop anyway.

Tom gave me a tour. He said his great-uncle had founded the business. It was laid out kind of like Monty’s, but with more high-tech machines and less noise.

“I can’t take you in that section,” he said, indicating a gray door with no marking on it. “Classified stuff. Our biggest contract and we can’t even show it off.”

“Can you tell me what you make in there?”

“I’m not supposed to, but they put out a press release on it. I could find you a copy. I can tell you that federal ID cards have to be made in this country.”

“My company has some federal work too, so I understand what you’re saying,” I said. “Did that press release by any chance come from a congressman’s office?”

He winked at me. “So did the contract, if you want to look at it that way.”

I could see he wanted to talk about what he did, although I was going to get a lot of the story in hints and implications. I guessed I’d get a lot of it by pretending I already knew it.

“That’s the same technology you used in making the EarEyes?”

“Pretty much. The machines we use for sealing,” he said. “Time was they just laminated some of the IDs, back before you could buy a vacuum sealer for your kitchen. The EarEyes were finicky about being airtight.”

“You can talk about them pretty freely?”

“Yeah. Dan didn’t have any qualms about talking about them. He liked discussing the technique and the technology.”

“Dan?” I asked.

“Dan Tucker. He invented the thing. Laughed about all it did like it was some kind of gag. He just wanted to use it for some kind of microphone, but then some research labs started buying them and the burglar alarms caught on. We made more than a hundred thousand of them that year. They were god-awful simple to make.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about the simplicity. Maybe it was like the moonshine they used to make a few counties north of there. The process was simple but the stories were god-awful complicated. That explained why I’d been flying around the country for two weeks for three different clients if I counted Eddie during the freelance part of it.

“What went into them?” I asked. “It seems like they do a lot for something so simple.”

“Just a couple of chips, and the mesh. The chips were such an old design, Dan said they were just shy of being vacuum tubes. We pulled the last few out of some old radios we bought on eBay.”

“Is that why you stopped making them?” I asked. “Because the chips were hard to find?”

“No, there was a company up in the Valley that could’ve put them all on one smaller chip. But we ran out of Holy Gold to make the mesh with.”

“That’s the same thing the machine shop told me,” I said. “Why couldn’t you get any more?”

“Dan said they quit making it. I don’t know what he meant by that.”

We had been heading for his office, I think, but had stopped on a catwalk overlooking the main production floor. There was constant work and movement below us, but no manual labor. I guess it was the kind of place that would produce technology to somebody else’s specs.

“Did you ask him? What he meant, I mean.”

He let his eyes wander across the shop, and worked his lips like he was tasting whatever he was thinking.

“I should have, but we weren’t really getting along about then. I was still mad about losing the work.”

“Did it cost you a lot to shut it down?” I asked.

“Aw, Hell no. Not a lot of startup costs. We already had most of the production line. And we were able to move everybody who worked on it to other projects. No, it’s just that we were making money hand over fist with those things. We were thinking about hiring a marketing firm but the first year’s run sold without us doing that. Dan told us how much he wanted for each one we sold and we got to keep the rest. Keep the change, Dan called it.” He looked over the shop floor again for a few seconds. “I probably ought to get in touch with him sometime.”

“I could tell him you said hello if I find him,” I said.

He looked at me oddly, tilting his head to one side. “Find him? He’s still in the same house as far as I know.” When he pulled his phone out, I realized he was sending me the address. I almost held my breath. I relaxed when I felt my own phone buzz, and I moved on to the other question.

“The Holy Gold. Did it come from Sudan?”

“Sudan? No, somewhere in Nevada. Don’t know where you heard that.”

“Did anybody talk about fibres?”

“Not that I recall. When we were making the mesh, the two women on the line would call it thread, but there was an old boy there, we got him in shipping now, that would always correct them and call it wire. He was hard to get along with.”

I turned down his offer to come home to supper with him. Dan Tucker’s house was only five hours away, and if I drove most of it before getting a hotel, I could start fresh in the morning.

I could, but Dan couldn’t. I was worried Tom in Bristol had given me the wrong number, but Dan finally answered around 10, and told me to come around at 11. The timing was about right. Even with GPS, it took 45 minutes to get there. I’m not sure what I had expected. Dan lived in an old farmhouse at the end of a long lane. Even with a rental, the driveway ruts made five miles an hour a top speed, so the quarter mile of dust and dodging kept me sharp. Dan wasn’t. Whatever he had done in the hour since he answered the phone had included getting high. I could smell the smoke when I got out of the car and walked up to the wraparound porch.

I reached across the guitar in his lap to shake hands. He stopped his rocking chair for a second to return the greeting, then waved toward a chair on the porch.

“Nice place,” I said as I got comfortable.

“Yeah, it’s peaceful. Except when the tractors are out. I rent the land to grow corn.”

“Nowhere near Sudan,” I said, getting what I thought of as a formality out of the way. He looked puzzled, as people smoking weed sometimes do.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of places it’s nowhere near. That’s part of why I like it,” he said. “I got a text from Tom Wiel. It was good to hear from him. He said you had some questions about the plowshares.”

“Plowshares? That’s the first time I’ve heard them called that.”

“Yeah, you know, swords into plowshares. And there was that other thing too.”

“Other thing?”

“Yeah, it’ll come to me. What was it you wanted to know about the things?”

“The things,” I said, and chuckled. He did too, but he might have at a lot of things. “They’ve got a lot of names.”

“Yeah, that’s because people use them for so many different things. There’s even a school in the Midwest where they were going to measure people’s dreams or something. And some guy in Texas was supposedly going to use them for some kind of time travel. Gotta admire the ambitions.”

“What did you want to do with them?” I asked.

He picked up the bong beside his chair and held a lighter to it. There was enough weed left in it to produce an appreciable cloud when he finally exhaled. I did appreciate it, but I was working.

“A guy I was in a band with, Cop something, Miller or Weaver maybe, was always complaining that music was for everybody except the people who played it. He said he’d never heard a record that sounded like it did on stage. We started out trying to make a better microphone, one that would record in the middle of the band instead of from the room or from a board. There was some programming, some interpretation, that we got some old chips for. Some kind of military surplus from some kind of missile that never worked. That’s why we called them that. Swords to plowshares, you know. That and the wire. The Plowshare Thread, we called it.”

“Was there a sword? A gold one would be kind of heavy, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. It seems like it would.” He seemed decidedly unexcited about the possibility. I waited while he watched a cloud or a bird. Something moving, I guess, because his eyes did. I decided to make conversation until the initial rush from the bong hit wore off.

“You live here alone?”

“The kids are at college. Just me and my wife.”

“Is her name Sue?” Sue-Dan maybe?

“Close but not quite. Her name’s Carol.” How was that close? This was going to take awhile. “Yeah, the wire, the thread was named for the tests out there. We always thought there must be more of it besides just the two rocks we bought, but the same thing would happen to it.”

I hadn’t smoked weed since college, but felt like I was getting a contact high from trying to follow the conversation. The gaps were a compendium of things he thought he’d already told me, things he thought I knew, and things he couldn’t remember. It was going to be a long morning.

“Out there? You mean Nevada?”

“Yeah. They weren’t real careful about them either. It’s funny, I got a call from somebody out there a few weeks ago.” I felt like I knew what was coming. “He was having some kind of trouble with the EarEyes. He thought it was the Plowshare Thread.” That’s not what the Feds called it. “But it’s all like that. Probably just as well we didn’t make any more.”

“Yeah, I’d heard some of them were failing,” I said. “That’s what got the Feds interested.”

“Why didn’t they just ask me?” he said. I could think of three possibilities. One was they were too busy trying to find somebody in China or Russia responsible for the changes. The second was they didn’t even know who’d invented and produced the things. The third was they were afraid of a conversation like this.

“I’m not sure about that,” I said. “They thought it was some kind of foreign interference.”

That struck him as funny. Something about his laughter was contagious, but I stopped first. He had to cough for half a minute and have another bong hit.

“Can we do some yes-or-no stuff? To help me get some stuff straight?” He nodded. “There was a mesh of some kind in the devices that was made out of very fine gold wire. The wire was made from Holy Gold and it was called Plowshare Thread.”

He nodded excitedly, proud to have such a good student.

“You had about a hundred pounds of Holy Gold, in two rocks of almost pure ore. You had some surplus chips. Monty’s drew the wire, and TZ Wiel’s put the gadgets together from the specs you came up with. Wiel’s produced about a hundred thousand of them and most of them were wholesaled to security firms. How am I doing?”

“Ah, I guess you’re all right. You want something to drink?”

“No, I’m good. But you and Wiel’s quit making them after about a year. Because you couldn’t get any more of the gold.”

“I guess we could have, but the same thing would have happened.”

“You mean they would have stopped working? Or slowed down?”

“Yeah,” he said, sounding surprised. “How’d you hear about that?”

“The federal government and a Hollywood technocrat told me about it and are paying me thousands of dollars to find out why it’s happening.”

He started laughing again. I was starting to worry about him. He went in the house and came out with a can of soda. He brought one for me too. We sipped and he coughed some more. The break gave me time to click around on my phone and try to make sense of what I’d learned. Plowshare had to be the Project Plowshare nuclear tests in the desert outside Las Vegas in the early 1960s.

“If I have the timeline right,” I said when we got engaged again. “You used up the Holy Gold and sold everything TZ Wiel could produce. But then you couldn’t make any more.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t need to. We had enough of the stage microphones, and I got about a hundred twenty, hundred thirty off every one Wiel sold. Maybe ninety dollars each after all the taxes and costs and all that stuff.”

I did some quick math in my head.

“So you made enough to retire?”

“No, I’m still working. Come see my shop.”

I was getting used to touring shop floors. This one took us through a well-used but well-kept living room, then through what looked like a music and TV room, maybe one where somebody had executed a search warrant. The shop was pristine. Guitars and guitar parts, tools, and strings were arranged precisely and neatly. He showed me some rich-looking wood and explained the differences among the pieces.

“Mahogany or koa is good. I like working with Honduras Rosewood but it’s almost as hard to find as Holy Gold. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this piece.” He picked up what looked like an over-sized wedding ring, but turned out to be a coil of gold wire so thin it seemed to disappear into the air when he let it uncoil. A few of the curves caught the sunlight between motes of dust. He flicked his wrist and it bounced back into his hand. “It’s every definition of fine,” he said. “It’s thin, it’s perfect, it’s rare.”

“Fine as frog hair?” I said.

“Yeah, that’s probably what they were talking about.” I didn’t ask who they were.

“So the fact that it was such pure ore is what made it rare?”

“No, I don’t know where you got that,” he said, with some disappointment in his voice. “There’s probably more in the ground out there, but it’s probably been dug up and used. They didn’t know what they had, and now it’s too late.”

“You couldn’t trace it, make more of the devices?”

“No, it doesn’t matter when it was mined. It will still have faded.”

“Faded?” I asked.

“Yeah, whatever those bomb tests did to it is wearing off faster and faster. It was sensitive enough that if you made the mesh right, it would pick up sights, sounds, movements, just about anything. If a mic uses ten percent of the detecting power, it might work for another twenty years. But the specialty stuff won’t last that long. Half-life, you know.”

And if he was the workshop genius, the Holy Gold Edison, then he was probably fading at the same rate. He could make guitars for a long time, but I wondered if he could still create something like the EarEyes from scratch.

“How strong would the detector part of it have been if somebody had found the Holy Gold when it was first made? Say, right after the tests and whatever they did to it.”

“You know that thing about the Beatles music being remastered for CD? Paul’s bass could finally be heard the way he wanted. If you did it with vinyl, the needle would bounce out of the groove? If you’d made a mic with Holy Gold when it was just a couple of years old, you could have heard his bass from here.”

I let that sink in. Thought about what could have been done with the metal, what little had been. Now it sounded like nothing else could happen. The Holy Gold wasn’t holy any more. The possibilities had all faded. I could tell Carl his studio mics would work for a few more years. I’d tell my boss about it and maybe he’d figure a way to make money off the knowledge by shorting stocks or something. He could tell the Feds whatever he wanted to.

“I looked up the Plowshare Project,” I said. “One of the biggest tests was code-named Sedan.”

“Yeah, that sounds right.”

“Did you ever use that name?”

“Yeah, come to think of it,” he said. “The guys in the band I was working with on the original mics wanted to call their band Sedan Threads. I think the guy that called me about the mic failing might have still called it that. They thought it was funny for some reason. They were smoking a lot of dope back then.”

I wonder what constituted a lot.

“Could the name have been Sedan Fibres?”

“Yeah, I never liked it though. Plowshare Thread was better.”

“Why didn’t you like it?” I asked.

“I just thought Plowshare would be easier to explain as a name than Sedan. And I always worried that too many people would confuse it with Sudan.”