26 Team Builder

Sandy disappeared during the communal breakfast the next day, then surprised me a while later by bringing five women to add to our build team.

"They're educated," she explained, "some of them have experience. We need their hands, they need to get pregnant, and the men in our group seem okay. What do you think?"

I looked over at the matron, one of the typical steel-haired ladies dressed in blue with a New Kingdom flag pinned to her blouse, next to a special braid that indicated their matronly authority. There was always someone like her wherever women congregated, ensuring they did their work and their duty. This one's name was Murati.

"The extra hands will let us make up for lost time. Any objections?"

"No sir," she said in sour, doubtful tones, "but you'll make sure they don't come to any unnecessary harm. I don't want you boys all over them like wild animals. We have trouble enough with the soldiers and greenies."

Unnecessary harm was a strange turn of phrase, but it helped me understand what Sandy was trying to do, and why Matron Murati would allow it. Each of the women wore an emblem that looked a bit like a Celtic knot, different from Murati's, which indicated they had recently had children, but they were nearing the end of their grace period between pregnancies. The workshop could give them something approaching choice, a chance to mix with men who weren't soldiers or greenies, and maybe get pregnant before they got dumped into the damnable lottery.

Like most empires, New Kingdom was built on a violence that reached into every corner of life. No matter how important your job was, or your supposed rank within the nation, or the protections you allegedly enjoyed, there was always someone above you who could inflict random harm. All of us in the workshop were conquered people, and the greenies especially could do what they wanted with most of us. The only exceptions were pregnant women, myself because of my position, and Sandy because she was mine. A woman who had "given" four children to the kingdom was freed from the sexual labors, but even they were subject to the greenies' whims.

From across the room, Psi the former workshop leader made disgruntled noises and complained loudly to the nearby soldiers. "This'll be good, getting women to do technical work. I'll be back on top in a week."

Hector replied to him, with a mouth full of porridge and dried fruit. "Uh, don't count on it? Guy's a genius, you'll see."

Merced took note. The scrounger looked at me, from two tables away, then looked at Hector, questioningly. I made a cutting motion with my hand. He's not one of mine. Not any more.

We started the workday by covering the basics. Six men, five women, and a resentful Psi, crowded into our living room where I handed out some of Sandy's most recent work. I saw a lot of embarrassment around the table when they flipped over the boards to look at how she had made neat connections with little dabs of molten solder. It was like none of them had ever seen a properly soldered bit of electronics before, at least not when done by hand. I have no idea why Ludovic, or whomever he had appointed for the recruitment job, thought these men had the skill to do anything more complicated than change the batteries in a flashlight or plug in a game console.

"You just need some training," I told them. "You have to identify the right parts, put them in the right order pointing in the right direction, and solder them without shorting or damaging other parts. It's mostly practical stuff, but I'll teach a little theory too. We'll start exercises today, and by next week you'll be making things that work."

Psi interrupted, "You can't teach these idiots anything. You should start over with a new crew. Let me pick some better people for you."

"I'm going to try training them first," I told Psi, "and you, too. Anyone who can tell good work from bad and fix their own errors, I'll keep. Anyone else will have to find a different job."

"Well, your designs are shit! They could do better if your schematics didn't suck. I bet none of this even works!"

"It does work," I told him, "we can go to the zombie pens right now, and I'll show that it works. I gave a demonstration to His Radiance, and that's how I ended up here. But if you behave, I'll teach you how to do it right."

Psi left the room, and kicked the chair away as he went, knocking it into one of the women, almost causing her unnecessary harm on her first day. Everyone in the room had to stop and witness his tantrum. He stormed out, and that was the last I would see of him for a while.

It didn't take long to discover the limits of my team's knowledge about electronics. They knew circuits had to be "complete" in order to work, starting from one end of the battery and ending at the other, with various components in between. They knew that much, and they knew how to melt huge globs of solder onto sensitive components (a habit they would need to unlearn) but they didn't know how to read the color bands on resistors or put LED lights in the right way around. They didn't know what the various parts did. They didn't know what Ohm's law was. They had a box full of multimeters that nobody used, which would have been shocking to me if I hadn't just found out they didn't know what resistance was.

The one thing they did have, and this was the criteria used to recruit them, was math. They could all handle basic arithmetic and a little algebra. Maybe you're laughing right now, but that many years into Plague most young adults couldn't manage long division, never mind the esoterica of using letters in place of numbers. A lot of adults from Before had learned algebra in high school but found little use for it in their daily lives. My builders had been drafted from settlements east of the Rockies based on their ability to handle simple algebra, and their good close-up vision. If Psi did one thing right with his team, that was it.

The main thing Psi had done wrong was keep the only copy of The Good Book to himself and then try to teach them something he didn't understand. At least one of them should have turned out a good device in the weeks they had been trying, if they had all been allowed access to the all-important tablet. It had some good instructional books on the basics, since those were prerequisites to building anything from the schematics, and if they had been reading those instead of relying on Psi they could have turned out something useful once in a while.

The other thing Psi had done wrong was only consider men. Three of the women in our group could read the schematics just fine. All they needed was a chance to refresh some stale skills.

I had my team all build the simplest possible circuit using a solderless breadboard, jumper wires, one resistor, one red LED light, and a double-A battery. Half of them put the LED in backwards, which immediately told me they didn't know there was a forward. I had to explain to them that LED stands for "light emitting diode", and is a special kind of diode that just happens to light up when you run electric current through it. The main property of a diode is that it only allows current to flow in one direction, so if you want your LED to work then you need to put it into a circuit the right way around. Otherwise, it just sits there and blocks the current.

Stolen story; please report.

Their next biggest problem was identifying resistors. It is easiest to think of resistors as passive chunks of material that limit the amount of power flowing through a circuit: the typical resistor looks like a tiny barrel with wires sticking out its ends. The strength of a resistor is measured in ohms, and is coded on the device as four colored bands, each band one of ten colors. If you're color blind then you're out of luck, and you better get someone to read it for you.

In the Estes house, word had somehow gotten around that two resistors with the same colors have a similar value, even if the colors are in a different order. Depending on which bands are transposed that could even be true some of the time, and I'm sure the occasional success is what gave legs to that ridiculous idea. I tried not to visibly shake my head while I drew a decoding key onto the whiteboard and a border around the diagram that said, "Do Not Erase". The fourth band of color is a multiplier, and changes the value of the preceding bands by factors of ten. Red-red-red-black is 222 ohms. Red-red-black-red is 22,000 ohms. By the time I was done explaining, most of the room was groaning piteously, muttering curses at the absent Psi, and holding their heads in their hands.

Sandy and I split the group in half. She had the better hands, so she taught practical skills with hot iron and solder, and how to use the multimeters and test equipment. She made them solder a dozen components together, measure current through the circuit, then unsolder them. Solder removal is actually an important skill. When you make a mistake, or if you want to salvage parts from another piece of equipment, you have to quickly and carefully melt the solder and wick it away with a length of braided wire and then clean the area.

While she covered the practical, I taught the theoretical. Ohm's law is simple, but crucial to know. Knowing what the components did and how they worked wasn't strictly necessary, but I still harbored hope that an education is never wasted. If there was another inventive mind in the house then it was my duty to train them.

On the logistics side, I asked Merced to round up enough tablets so we could install a Good Book for everyone. He was concerned I didn't have any other requests, but the truth was I didn't even know what we had on hand. There were so many things in boxes we hadn't opened, and there was no inventory list to be found. In response, he handed me a printed list of everything his team had ever procured for Psi. The list was suspicious for its length and the sheer bulk of some of the items: three hundred solar panels; five high-end wall batteries; a pallet of electric car batteries. I was confident we didn't have any of that in the house, but I would have to organize a search to make sure.

All we did was practice and teach for the first several days, for seven hours a day, burning through our power budget just to run all the soldering irons. Winter and the surrounding mountains meant there was never enough sunlight, so I rotated a third of my crew at a time for inventory. That's what I called them, but they were really a search team, looking for all of the missing batteries and solar panels from Merced's list. They weren't in the house, and they weren't in any of the other buildings in the compound. We checked attics and basements, garages and outbuildings, and came up with nothing. Some of my people remembered large boxes being delivered and sitting on pallets in the front lawn for a few days, but one morning they came to work and the pallets were gone. Psi didn't like questions, so nobody had asked where the pallets had disappeared to, or what had been on them.

On day six we turned out our first working devices: a handful of static generators. I knew they would work, because the oscilloscope said they would, but the builders had never seen them in action. So, I got with Sergeant Alvarez and we took the builders on a little field trip out to the zombie pen, our only excursion out of the compound thus far, and tested them. The static generators hid us from the zombies, which wandered away aimlessly, just like they were supposed to. The team cheered and congratulated each other, and Sandy and I cheered with them but for a different reason. We had taken a bunch of random people, mostly neophytes, and turned them into useful assemblers in a matter of days. Sure, their work was slow and messy, often had to be re-done, and required thorough testing, but they knew how to build and they knew how to test and with practice they would get faster.

I put that first batch in the hands of Merced, our logistics guy, because we still didn't have the parts we needed for sleep rays and I didn't want anyone to die while scavenging for them. Each of his team got two of the static generators, so they would have a backup in case the improvised housings failed. They really were ramshackle little things: you had to wrap the case in plastic and seal it with tape to protect the electronics from moisture. But they worked, reliably so, and if you had a backup then breaking one while you were ghosting through a horde wasn't an instant death sentence.

I also gave Merced a new list of parts for wind generators. Estes Park in winter might not have much sunlight, but it has plenty of wind. Given some powerful magnets, enough wire, and some basic materials, I could make up some of the shortfall in our energy budget by building wind turbines. The best part was, I didn't have to wrap all the generator coils myself this time: I had a house full of people to do that for me.

That was about the time Green Unicorn started showing up. He was one of Ludovic's helmeted henchmen, but he wore the white helmet of an "Accountability Officer", to which he had stuck decals of a green, grimacing unicorn. We hadn't seen any greenies inside our compound since we arrived, but we knew they had to send someone to check on us eventually.

I gave Green Unicorn a tour of the workshop, explained I had taught everyone enough to turn out working devices, told him about our capacity, and handed over an executive summary that Ludovic might actually read. It was one page, minimal text, and a small table that said how many device we could make with the parts we had, and how many of each device we could make per week. When he spoke he reminded me of Darth Vader but without the heavy breathing. He asked a few questions, but in his echoing voice they sounded scary. "Why are you only now producing devices," and, "why can't you make sleep rays," and "when will the sleep rays be forthcoming," and so on.

I kept my answers honest but brief, held down my fear, and looked Green Unicorn right in the tinted visor when I answered him.

"I require a woman," echoed Green Unicorn. "I'll have that one." He pointed at Sandy, because of course he would want the tiniest, most vulnerable-looking female in the room.

"She's mine," I said, entirely on reflex. I held out my arm to show the bracelet that proved our affiliation, while Sandy held hers up in the air from across the room. "Choose someone else."

There was a moment, when he looked down at my waist and saw I carried a knife, that I thought I would have to fight him.

"Pick me, please!" Valerie, one of our builder women, volunteered. She kept her hair in long braids, and always wore tops that showed some cleavage. She had three children who lived in a nearby compound, and she was aiming for her fourth as soon as possible. To that end she was having frequent sex, with different men, always from the builder team. We had designated the second bedroom in the basement for those kinds of encounters, because with five women in the house, all desperate to avoid the lottery, there was a lot of very purposeful sex. I was glad that our housekeeper Esme had to deal with the laundry and I had already made a habit of slipping her some of our extra food rations.

Valerie led away her latest donor by the arm, complementing him on his height and appealing buttocks. Green Unicorn went along and didn't seem to mind in the least.

"Freedom in four," quoted the remaining women, in unison.

Green Unicorn made a habit of stopping by twice a week after that. His routine was always the same: he asked banal questions in an ominous tone, congratulated us for our work, and then went off with Valerie for a half hour or more while someone else had to pick up her work. They continued their routine even after she was confirmed pregnant, which prompted some gossipy questions from the team. "Are you going to let him claim you?" "Will you go live in the palace?" On and on. If you shut a dozen people up in a house all day every day and give them repetitive work, gossip is about the only joy left to them.

Six days after we equipped Merced with static generators he returned near the end of shift, all smiles, and hugged me. Then he hugged Sandy. And then he shook hands and patted the backs of every one of our builders. His two fellow scavengers, normally a silent lot, insisted on doing the same. In addition to all the electronics we had asked for, they had brought a ration of liquor for the whole compound. For Sandy and me personally, they had a few bottles of aged scotch, one of which got opened right away and splashed into glasses until everyone had some and the bottle was empty.

"Incredible!" Merced shouted, "it's like being invisible! To the Engineer!" They toasted me, I toasted Sandy and the team, then Merced toasted the king (I think it was obligatory), and we sauntered out under the cold shadow of Deer Mountain, Eagle Cliff, and the other high peaks that cut us off from the setting sun.

Sandy and I would stay in Estes park until late March but we would never see the end of snow there, for spring comes late to the mountains.