[DAILY LOGIN — DAY 2]
[+10 Tech Points]
[Current Tech Points: 20]
The number was the first thing he checked, before his eyes had fully adjusted to the dark, before the alarm had even finished its first cycle. Twenty. Not much of anything, and also, somehow, twice what he'd had the day before, which was a kind of progress his brain insisted on registering even though twenty and two hundred were not, by any honest measure, in the same conversation.
Mohamed lay in bed a moment longer than usual and did the thing he was going to spend the next nineteen days doing, which was recalculate a number that did not need recalculating.
Twenty now. Ten more tomorrow, thirty. Ten more the day after, forty. He could see the whole slope of it already, a staircase with eighteen more steps in it, each one exactly the height of the last, no shortcuts visible anywhere in the catalog he'd read three times before falling asleep.
He got up. Coffee, dish towel, the stain shaped like Ohio. Nothing about the morning routine had changed, which struck him, standing at the counter waiting for the machine to finish its cough, as either deeply reassuring or deeply strange, and possibly both at once — that a man could wake up with an alien intelligence quietly ticking numbers in the corner of his vision and still, somehow, need to remember to buy more Folgers before the weekend.
He drove to work. He sat at his desk. He opened the Q1 variance report, which had not resolved itself overnight any more than the number in the corner of his eye had, and for a while the two things sat next to each other in his attention with the same flat, patient inevitability — Cincinnati would keep double-counting Sharonville until somebody above his pay grade cared enough to fix the query, and the System would keep giving him ten points a day until he had two hundred, and neither fact bent for wanting.
At 11:40 he went to the vending machine.
The sandwich was a dollar seventy-five. He fed the machine two ones, took his quarter, and stood there for a moment doing arithmetic he had never once in eight years thought to do about his own lunch.
A dollar seventy-five a day. Twenty days until the chamber. Thirty-five dollars, near enough, spent on sandwiches between now and the day he could finally buy the first physical thing that would let him find out what any of this was actually for.
He could pack a lunch. He'd thought about it before — everyone thought about it before, the way everyone thought about a gym membership in January — and had never quite managed to make the thought survive contact with an actual Sunday evening spent standing in his own kitchen instead of doing literally anything else. But thirty-five dollars was thirty-five dollars, and thirty-five dollars was roughly a fifth of what the used tube furnace he'd already started pricing on eBay the night before was going to cost, and Mohamed Vance had never in his adult life been the kind of man who let a fifth of anything go to waste on a sandwich.
He sat back down at his desk with the quarter still in his hand and pulled up a browser tab that had nothing to do with Ohio Valley freight tonnage.
Chemical vapor deposition, used equipment, tube furnace.
The search returned exactly what he'd found the night before, because the internet had not changed overnight any more than the number had: a scattering of listings from university surplus auctions, laboratory liquidators, and one deeply confusing forum thread from 2014 about a man in Ohio who'd built his own from a kiln element and a pizza oven, which Mohamed bookmarked without entirely deciding whether he meant to read it seriously or was simply enjoying, for a moment, the specific comfort of a problem that had other people's fingerprints already on it.
A used Lindberg Blue M, decent condition, four hundred and fifty dollars plus shipping. That was equipment. The blueprint itself — whatever it turned out to actually specify — was going to cost Tech Points, not dollars, and he still had no idea what the ratio between those two currencies was going to demand of him once he got past the first purchase.
"You're quiet today," Ray said, from the next desk, not looking up from his own monitor. "Usually by now you've told me Cincinnati's wrong twice."
"Cincinnati's wrong. I just didn't feel like saying it twice."
"Huh." Ray considered this with the seriousness of a man for whom office gossip constituted a kind of civic duty. "You're not sick. You're not dating anybody, or you'd have told Denise, and Denise would've told my wife, and I'd already know. So what is it?"
"Thinking about a project."
"What kind of project."
Mohamed looked at the tab still open on his second monitor — a laboratory liquidator's website, a photograph of a beige metal cylinder with a digital readout, four hundred and fifty dollars, free local pickup only, seller located in Cincinnati, which struck him as either a coincidence or the single most on-brand detail his week had produced so far.
"Home improvement," he said, which was, strictly speaking, not a lie, if you were sufficiently generous about the definition of home and the definition of improvement.
"Home improvement." Ray said it the way he said most things, like he was turning it over to check for a seam. "You don't own a home. You rent a one-bedroom off Bardstown with a leaky ceiling, I've heard you complain about it for three years."
"The unit I'm looking at isn't for the apartment."
"So it's for a storage unit."
Mohamed went very still for exactly one second, which was, he understood immediately, precisely the kind of tell that a man like Ray Dombrowski had spent fifty-six years learning to catch.
"Maybe," he said.
"Maybe." Ray grinned, delighted, and rolled his chair fully around this time instead of the usual six inches. "Vance. What is going on with you."
"Nothing's going on with me, Ray."
"A month ago you were the most predictable man in this building. You ate the same sandwich, you flagged the same Cincinnati mistake, you went home at five-oh-one on the dot like the building was on fire. Now you're quiet, you're looking at industrial ovens on your work computer, and you won't tell me what the project is." Ray held up both hands, mock-surrendering. "I'm not gonna pry. I'm just saying — a man's allowed to notice things about the guy who sits four feet from him for eight hours a day."
"It's nothing exciting," Mohamed said, which was, on reflection, the largest lie he had told anyone since Tuesday morning, and it came out easier than he expected, which unsettled him more than the lying itself did. "I'm trying to build something. It's a hobby thing. I don't know if it'll go anywhere."
"What kind of something?"
"I don't know yet. That's the honest answer."
Ray studied him a moment longer, and something in his face shifted — not suspicion exactly, something closer to the specific respect one careful, unglamorous man extends to another when he recognizes the shape of a project even without knowing its contents.
"Well," Ray said, rolling back to his own desk. "Whatever it is, don't spend the whole four-fifty on the first oven you find. Check if it ships or if you gotta drive up and get it yourself. Shipping on something that heavy'll eat you alive."
"...Thanks, Ray."
"I know things," Ray said, with enormous satisfaction, and went back to his spreadsheet, and Mohamed sat there for a second, faintly stunned by how close a man who watched too much daytime television and gossiped like it was a paid position had just come to giving him genuinely useful advice.
He checked. Ray was right. Local pickup only, Cincinnati, ninety minutes up I-71.
He added it to a list.
He went home at 5:04, the same as always, and instead of turning on the television he sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad he'd bought at the CVS on the way home — ninety-nine cents, the cheapest one they had, spiral-bound, yellow — and started writing down numbers the way he wrote down numbers for a living, except this time nobody was paying him and nobody was going to read it but him.
Day 2. 20 TP.CVD Chamber blueprint: 200 TP. ~18 more days at current rate.Furnace (Cincinnati, pickup): $450.Gas system, tubing, fittings: unknown, TBD.Storage space: unknown, TBD. Apartment has no ventilation for this. Need somewhere else.Savings: $4,200.
He looked at the last line for a long time.
Four thousand two hundred dollars. Two years of not going out, not buying anything he didn't need, riding the Corolla past a hundred and eighty thousand miles instead of trading it in, all of it accumulated with no particular purpose beyond the vague, formless anxiety of a man who did not trust that anything good was reliably coming and wanted, at minimum, a cushion for whatever bad thing eventually did.
He had never once, in two years of saving it, had a plan for what the money was for.
Now, apparently, it was for a furnace in Cincinnati and a storage unit he hadn't rented yet and a gas system he didn't understand the specifications of, in service of a blueprint he couldn't afford for another eighteen days, for a project the System itself hadn't bothered to explain beyond a single sentence about acceleration and Tier 6 and cooperation being voluntary.
He wrote one more line at the bottom of the page, underlined it twice, the way he underlined the one number in any spreadsheet that actually mattered once everything else had been sorted:
Twenty days. Be patient. Don't spend anything until you know what you're building toward.
He looked at it a while. Then, because the day had been long and the number in the corner of his vision hadn't moved since morning and wasn't going to move again until midnight came and went, he made dinner — pasta, jarred sauce, the same dinner he made most Tuesdays — and ate it standing at the counter, and washed the pot, and sat on the couch with the television on and the sound low, not really watching it, running the arithmetic one more time out of a habit that was already, after two days, starting to feel less like anxiety and more like company.
Eighteen more mornings like this one. He could do eighteen mornings.
He'd been doing this exact morning, more or less unchanged, for six years already. Eighteen more, in service of something that might actually be worth the doing, felt, if he was honest with himself in the particular quiet of a Tuesday night in March, like the easiest eighteen days he'd been asked to survive in longer than he could remember.
By Friday the number was fifty, and the shape of the days had already, with unsettling speed, become a shape he recognized.
Wake. Check the number. Coffee, dish towel, drive, desk, Cincinnati's wrong numbers, sandwich, drive home, dinner, the legal pad. He hadn't told anyone else. He hadn't called his mother back with anything closer to the truth than work busy. He'd texted Ray once, on Thursday night, a single link to a listing for argon regulators, with no message attached, because Ray had asked what kind of something and this felt like the safest possible answer — data with no explanation, the kind of thing a coworker could see and forget by morning.
Ray had texted back: that's not home improvement.
Mohamed hadn't answered. Ray hadn't pushed.
He spent Friday evening doing the part of the project that cost nothing but time, which was the part he was best at. He didn't have the blueprint yet. He didn't know, specifically, what he was building or what quantities he'd need of anything. But a CVD chamber, whatever else it turned out to be, was going to need a controlled atmosphere to do whatever it did, and a controlled atmosphere meant an inert gas, and an inert gas meant a supplier, and Mohamed had learned enough in nine years of forgetting his chemical engineering degree to know that inert gas suppliers did not sell lecture-bottle quantities of anything to a residential address without asking questions he didn't yet have good answers to.
He called the first number on the list Ray's link had turned up — a specialty gas distributor in Jeffersontown — on his lunch break Monday, standing in the stairwell because the desk floor didn't have enough privacy for a conversation he didn't want Ray overhearing twice in one week.
"I'm looking into argon cylinders," he said. "Small quantity. Research use."
"Research for who?" A woman's voice, bored, mid-transaction on her end, a register beeping somewhere behind her.
"Independent. It's a personal project."
"We don't really do residential." A pause, the specific pause of someone deciding whether the call was worth the extra thirty seconds. "You got a business license? Even a sole proprietorship, that'd probably do it. Argon's not the scary one, honestly — you could probably get a small cylinder without a hazmat cert. It's if you ever come back asking about silane or hydrogen that people start wanting paperwork."
"I don't have a license yet."
"Get one. It's like forty dollars online, takes ten minutes, and it opens up basically every supplier in the state to you. Cash-and-carry research guys like you are more common than you'd think — half our small accounts are exactly that." Her tone had shifted, mildly, into something almost helpful, the specific warmth of someone who dealt with enough genuine oddballs that a stranger asking sensible questions was a relief rather than a burden. "Come back once you've got the license. We'll set you up."
Mohamed stood in the stairwell for a moment after he hung up, faintly astonished at how simple the answer had turned out to be, and equally astonished at how little he'd known about his own state's business registration process despite having lived in it his entire life.
He filed the LLC paperwork online that night — sole proprietorship first, the cheapest and fastest option, a placeholder he told himself he'd revisit once he understood what, exactly, he was placeholding for. Forty-one dollars. A name he picked in under a minute, tired and a little punchy from the week: Vance Research, because it was accurate and because nothing about Tuesday morning had left him with the energy to be clever about it.
He added the number to the legal pad, under Friday's tally.
Day 6. 60 TP. LLC filed — Vance Research. Gas supplier confirmed once license clears.
He looked at the growing list of small, unglamorous, entirely mundane tasks that had, without his quite noticing the transition, become the actual texture of the most extraordinary thing that had ever happened to him. Not a montage. Not a door swinging open. A business license. A phone call to a gas distributor in Jeffersontown. A woman with a bored voice and, buried in the boredom, exactly the piece of practical information he'd needed and hadn't known to ask for.
The System did not comment on any of it. It simply sat in the corner of his vision, unmoved, the number climbing ten at a time, patient in a way that had stopped feeling strange sometime around Thursday and had started, instead, to feel like the only entirely honest thing in his life — no promises, no encouragement, no judgment either. Just the number, and the days, and the slow arithmetic of getting from here to two hundred.
He was, he calculated on Sunday night, fourteen days out.
He went to his mother's the next morning with a bag of laundry and said nothing about any of it, and ate her pot roast, and let her ask about his back-that-wasn't-his-back the way she always did.
"You've got that look again," Cheryl Vance said, halfway through the meal, not quite a question.
"What look."
"The one where you're doing math behind your eyes. You've had it since you were nine, when you were trying to figure out how many weeks of allowance it'd take to buy that telescope you wanted." She pointed her fork at him without any real accusation in it. "You never did buy that telescope."
"I bought it. Eventually. Junior year of high school, with lawn-mowing money."
"That's right, you did." She looked pleased with herself for remembering, or pleased with him for having finished the thing, it was hard to tell which. "What's the math for this time?"
He almost told her. The kitchen was warm, and the roast was good, and some old, tired part of him wanted very badly to put the whole impossible week down on the table between them and let someone else carry a corner of it for an hour.
"Work project," he said instead. "Nothing exciting. Just numbers that need to add up before I can move on them."
"They will. They always do, with you." She said it plainly, the way she said most things, no drama in it, just the flat confidence of a woman who had watched her son solve every patient, unglamorous problem she'd ever seen him take on. "You were always better at waiting than you gave yourself credit for. Most people can't stand it. You just do the math and let the days pass."
Mohamed looked at his mother across a kitchen table he'd eaten a thousand meals at, and thought that she had, without knowing anything true about the last week at all, described the exact shape of it more precisely than he could have managed himself.
"Fourteen more days," he said, before he could stop himself.
"Fourteen more days of what?"
"Waiting." He picked his fork back up. "It's fine. It's a good kind of waiting."
Cheryl Vance studied him a moment, the same careful look she'd given him over report cards and job offers and, once, a girl in college she'd never entirely approved of, and then let it go, the way she let most things go until they were ready to be picked back up.
"Eat your roast," she said. "Whatever it is, it'll still be waiting for you when you're done."
He drove home afterward thinking that fourteen days, at this point, felt less like a wait and more like a countdown he had already, somewhere in the last week, quietly decided to trust.