01 - Blueprint

It was just before dawn when Miles Holoway turned off a highway in West Vancouver and started up the black snaking asphalt towards the lab.

The vibration of the Norton transmitted directly through the grips, turning his hands into jellied meat. The rising altitude pressed his inner ear with each switchback turn. Rock striations swam past his periphery. Aeons of geological history chiseled away, paving a road to the future of tech.

The pistons missed a beat, spluttering in wet bronchial coughs. It hadn’t been in good shape when he first lifted that tarp behind his father’s workshop, and three years of sucking the corrosive coastal air off the nearby Pacific only pushed the bike’s case of congestion into the terminal stage. The grade increased as he reached the summit. His headlight dimmed in unison with the protesting motor between his legs.

“Come on,” he urged, biting down on the word, rocking his body weight. The motor ground rotations to the edge of choking and Miles’s brain played through a simulation of pushing it any further: his momentum coming to a halt, the non-existent breaks failing to prevent the bike reversing downhill, picking up momentum, then jackknifing him under the hot metal. Or worse, disintegrating into a rock wall, his pulverized body laying somewhere amongst the wreckage.

He cranked the last millimeter of throttle and kicked one foot off the ground to momentarily release his body weight. The beast exhaled a final guttural growl of desperation as it narrowly cleared the peak and clambered back onto flat ground. The bulb reeled back to full power and illuminated slab concrete walls in yellowed light, then came to rest on a brushed aluminum sign.

Blueprint “Optimizing for success”

Miles cut the engine. The misty morning silence returned and settled. He sat in it a while, wringing his numb hands. Dismounting the seat, his gaze found its way up and across a nebulous sky of pink and purple hues backlit by the glow of a newborn sun that hadn’t quite reached the horizon. Maybe an inconvenient place to build a startup, but the lack of light pollution had its advantage. Edging the sky’s amethyst color, the stars sparkled like flecks of metal in black sand. He thought of gold panning as a kid. How his father, Martin, would slip a few bright flakes into the pan before handing it over, and wait—just to see his son’s face when the gold rose from the silt. He remembered the night of one of those days. Camping out in the woods and staring up at a pristine night sky.

“Every bright dot in that velvety blanket of night is a sun,” his dad had said. “A sun just like ours, and around most of them are planets. Perhaps there’s one just like ours.” He pointed to a dense cluster of stars, “Yeah, right out there somewhere, I imagine there’s two guys, sitting in their camping chairs under a similar sky, looking out at us and wondering if they are alone in the universe.”

Miles remembered feeling very small in that moment. Insignificant amongst the rapidly expanding model of the universe growing inside his mind. Yet, he also felt like he’d been given a great secret. One hiding in plain sight and yet also beyond the periphery of people going about the narrow cone of their lives. He’d had many new thoughts that night. Why did no one ever talk about this? How can anything we do on this tiny fleck of a planet be meaningful against the backdrop of infinite darkness?

Staring at the heavens then, he found himself no different than the rest. Just another drop in the stream, oblivious to the wonder surrounding them, trekking to work each day to check off another list of never ending tasks, all destined for destruction in the heat death of the universe, a coronal mass ejection, or mutually-assured nuclear destruction—whatever came first. He envied his younger perspective, feeling that sense of awe had been lost somewhere along the way.

Miles surveyed the distant peninsula of downtown Vancouver, then ventured a guess as to how much longer he and his cofounder could enjoy the view. He blinked in rapid succession hoping to snapshot the image into long-term memory for later retrieval, then wondered if that ever really worked. He imagined some future version of himself looking back at this moment, from a time when he’d already solved the problems standing in front of him. He wondered where his future self was, if he was looking up at a star-filled sky too, and whether he was smiling back at him, saying “everything is going to be alright,” or whether he’d show an expression of pity, knowing how bad things were about to be. The fibers of time didn’t seem to answer his call.

He turned back towards the building and its copper-sheet double doors. Blueprint labs was a slab of concrete and glass jutting from the mountain’s shadow like an infinity pool at a luxury resort. It was modern, yet hung on the verge of Brutalist in style. Something Frank Lloyd Wright might have approved of.

Miles looted his pocket for a lint-encrusted ID badge before passing it over the door sensor. It flashed from red to green and a heavy bolt slid within the frame. Chandeliers in abstract shapes winked in the dark as he passed an obsidian reception desk and continued up an inclined corridor. The hallway curved around the structure like the backbone of a sleeping animal. The silence was eerie this early in the morning, the only sound being a muffled echo from his Chuck Taylors against the geometric-patterned carpet. Even years after being built, the hermetically sealed air still held the smell of fresh paint.

He passed a series of workspace doors with oversized yellow lettering counting the rooms from 1 to 10, then tapped his card at the last and stepped inside. It closed with a slow, hydraulic hiss behind him. Empty darkness flooded the space. The kind of dense atmosphere that didn’t feel quite the same at any other time of day. A stillness that dredged up fuzzy bits of his past as if in a sensory deprivation tank. In the absence of everything else, one can only look inward.

Miles thought about his time spent thus far at Blueprint. Wondered if he’d made the right decision coming here at all. They’d made strides, sure, but it was far from what he’d expected at the start. If anything, he felt worse. The glimmering potential of his unknown future was long gone now. Did he have anything to show for sacrificing the best part of his twenties?

His head filled with the splayed branches of it, every node a decision that had carried him to this exact spot. He worked back through the tree the way a chess player might work a lost game, testing, resetting, weighing how some minuscule difference might have changed the final board. His heartbeat climbed into a stutter that reminded him of just how useless the exercise was. He reached for the breathing method his grief counselor had drilled into him, the one genuinely useful thing he’d carried out of all those sessions. That, and meeting Simon.

He stood tall and folded his hands at his stomach. Images flashed before him. He visualized the negative thoughts as a giant tangle of black wires, mentally untangled them as if through telekinesis, then flung each strand from the cavern of his consciousness into the great expanse of the universe. His chest rose as he inhaled for four seconds, held it there for four seconds, then exhaled for as long as his breath could sustain. He repeated this process until all that was left were the sterile white walls of his mind, free of the dark mass of tangled thoughts.

The sudden increase in oxygen made him light-headed. He shifted his focus to the newly cleared white space and planned the day’s work. His fingers crawled the wall behind him and found their way to the green plunger connected to the lab’s main breaker. He popped it on with a fist.

The lab’s recessed ceiling lights fired up. His pre-coffee retinas winced. Fiber crates neatly lined one side of the matte-white walls, stacked high enough to nearly touch the industrial I-beams nestled into the vaulted ceiling. Copper wire and braided brass hose poked out from cardboard boxes like tentacled eyes. To his left was a small wooden crate with an Italian flag printed on the corner and worn shipping labels trapped beneath layers of customs stamps.

His pupils adapted to the increase in photons and he took in the fruits of his countless months spent in this room; a metallic cylinder, wires like angel hair pasta streaming from precise fittings, dotted with gauges, and CRYOPULSE in big, bold, sapphire lettering running up the side. Recalling where he left off the previous night, Miles picked up a pair of wire strippers and got to work.

* * *

By noon the problematic wiring harness was replaced and the pulsating chirp of the machine was steadily decaying from a successful dry run. Miles grinned like his long-shot horse just came in. He wiped blue sealant from his hands and an overhead speaker bellowed a dreadfully familiar accent.

“You’re lucky that thing hasn’t exploded… yet.”

Miles turned to see the cofounder of another of Blueprint’s startups, ‘Calypso’, staring daggers through the glass viewing window. Terrance or Laurence or something was his name. Miles hadn’t cared to learn it.

“Gary wants you in his office. Doesn’t seem very happy,” he said with a sinister smirk before disappearing down the corridor.

Miles tossed the rag to the table and grimaced.