White Death. Daniel Blake

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       14

       Wednesday, November 3rd

       Cambridge, MA

      Building 32 of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, better known as the Stata Center, is a whimsical cartoon village, a riot of angles and perspective. Walls swerve and collide, columns lean like Pisan towers, surfaces change color and texture at the drop of a hat, from dark brick to brushed aluminum, saffron paint to mirrored steel. Crumpled and concertinaed, the building looked as though it had suffered an earthquake.

      In an office with walls that sloped so violently no bookshelves would stand flush against them, Marat Nursultan sipped at his coffee.

      ‘You’re sure you haven’t heard from him?’ he said.

      Thomas Unzicker shook his head. He wore square-rimmed glasses and a WHO THE FUCK ARE HARVARD? sweatshirt. He was twenty-four, and still got ID-checked in pretty much every bar from here to Cape Cod.

      Nursultan clattered his spoon into the saucer. ‘We have to get hold of him.’

      Unzicker stared at Nursultan a good ten seconds before replying. Nursultan didn’t break the gaze. Unzicker rarely spoke unless the subject was computers, when you couldn’t shut him up; but otherwise, almost nothing. Nursultan didn’t know whether Unzicker was just shy or whether it was something deeper, more pathological. He didn’t care, either way. He wanted Unzicker for his peculiar form of genius, not for his company.

      ‘His mom’s dead.’ Unzicker’s voice was little more than a whisper. Nursultan had to lean forward to hear it. It was always like this. If a door slammed or someone was talking outside, you had to ask Unzicker to repeat himself; that’s how quietly he spoke.

      ‘I want to talk with him. Much important on this, you know. He being difficult before his mother dead. He try to play me both way, yes? Be difficult with title match, get advantage on this project. Or maybe other way round. But I not have it. I not do business that way. So tell me: you need him for this?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Really need him?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘You can’t do it on your own? Or get someone else in for him?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘This thing’s only going to work with the kind of chess Kwasi plays.’

      ‘There are other super-grandmasters.’

      Unzicker shook his head again. ‘Too much to explain to someone new.’

      ‘If someone beats us to it …’ Unzicker shrugged; Nursultan kept talking. ‘You sure no one else know about this?’ Headshake. ‘What that mean? Yes, no one know, or no, you not sure?’

      ‘I haven’t told anyone.’

      ‘The police? They been round?’ Headshake. ‘They check up on things. They want to find out about his mother, they examine every bit of his life, then they find us.’

      ‘We’re not doing anything illegal.’

      ‘No. But what we do, it is secret.’ He rubbed his fingers together. ‘Valuable.’

      Unzicker said nothing. In the corridor outside, a quartet of students in gym shorts padded past. A squeal of laughter from the day-care center echoed off the walls.

      Nursultan looked out of the window, across a roofscape dotted with Technicolor huts. MIT, he thought, was supposed to be about reason, logic, engineering excellence. But this building was like one of those car-crash sculptures, like someone had just thrown it up. It didn’t even look finished. And that was the point. What Unzicker was doing here, what everyone was doing here, it was all nothing more than work in progress. Science was an open question. Every discovery made was merely a stepping stone to the next one.

      Frank Gehry, who’d designed this place, had said the same about his buildings: they always looked more interesting under construction than when they were finished. That’s what he’d wanted here: that restless sense of something still happening. The floorplans looked like fractals. That was deliberate, to make sure the people inside didn’t think linearly. They were doing research that could change the world, they had to think in weird dimensions. If the building looked like it was leaping off the planet, so were the people inside. That was the theory, anyway.

      Nursultan smiled and stood. ‘Moment you hear something, you tell me. Remember who pay you. Remember how much more I pay when we make this work.’

      He patted Unzicker on the shoulder. It felt to Unzicker like the grasp of a bear’s claw.