“Of course, that assumes we can get Ted’s files sometime this century,” Keisha said, tossing her braids in a characteristic gesture of impatience.
“And assumes that some of us actually manage to get some programming done today,” Jack shot back. The rest of them looked a little guilty, and the impromptu meeting broke up.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to keep anyone from work.”
“You’re not,” he said with a shrug. “No one can concentrate; I think for a lot of these kids, it’s the first time they’ve ever known anyone who died. Anyone close to their own age, anyway. I’m just trying to give them enough time to talk it over among themselves, but not enough to sit around getting morbid.”
“Let me know if I can do anything to help,” I said.
“If you could get the police to hurry up and give back Ted’s files, that would be a lifesaver,” Jack said.
“The files are really that big a problem?”
“Not yet, but they will be pretty soon.”
“You don’t have a backup?”
He rolled his eyes. “If Ted had backed up regularly, or better yet, stored his stuff on the server, the way he was supposed to, we wouldn’t have a problem at all,” he said. “Unfortunately, this was Ted. Hell, half the time we needed something, it wouldn’t even be on his desktop machine; it’d be on his laptop, and he’d have left that home for the day. If we get the police to give us a copy of his files within a day or so, Luis can clean them up in time. If not…”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said. “Not that there’s all that much I can do, but we have a whole lot of lawyer relatives who’ve been begging us to let them know if they can do anything. Maybe I’ll call their bluff.”
“Great,” he said. “Well, this thing isn’t going to program itself.”
With that, he left the coffee room.
I heard a noise in the hall - a familiar yet oddly chilling sound. The rhythmic beep of the mail cart making its rounds.
I confess I was a little anxious when I stepped out into the hall to see the mail cart. It wasn’t the same mail cart Ted had been killed on, of course; the police had that. I’d called the company that supplied and serviced the mail cart, explained the situation, and asked them to bring over another one, ASAP. And while their initial definition of ASAP wasn’t at all what I had in mind, they quickly revised it, after I remarked that I hadn’t yet had any reason to tell the media what brand of mail cart had been used in the murder. So I’d been expecting to see a mail cart.
Still, it was more than a little odd to hear it for the first time, and to see it chugging down the hall again. I was strangely relieved to see nothing on it but mail. No still form - and for that matter, no attempts at decoration. Thank heaven for small favors.
As I watched it chug by, I noticed that several other people had stepped out of their cubes or offices to do the same thing. It was almost as if we’d declared a minute of silence to coincide with the start of the cart’s first run of the day. We all watched until it rounded the corner into the next corridor, and then we looked at each other, sheepishly.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Rico said, plucking at the hem of yet another RISD T-shirt. “Him getting killed on that thing.”
“I think it’s more ironic that he was killed with a mouse cord,” another graphic artist said. “Just think, maybe if we’d spent the money for wireless mice, Ted might be alive today.”
“No, but look at the irony of it being the mail cart,” Rico insisted. “It was like he was obsessed with it. Always playing with it.”
“And everyone else around here wasn’t?” I asked.
They shrugged their shoulders, sheepishly. If they’d tried to argue, I would have pointed out how much time the art department had spent over the past week decorating the mail cart.
“Yeah, we all played with it,” a programmer said. “But Ted was obsessed, definitely. He was the only one trying to re-program it.”
“Reprogram it?” I echoed.
“Yeah. You know how the thing works, right?”
“It follows a line of ultraviolet dye on the carpet.”
“More like a series of dots, really. It reads the dots, like Morse code. There’s patterns that mean turn left, turn right, stop. Ted got a black light, so he could see the dots, and he spent hours trying to make a dye that the machine could read and then something to wash out the dye. Didn’t work, of course.”