Chapter 10 “The Tower of Babble.”

Chapter 10

“The Tower of Babble.”

May 25^th, 2027.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.

The freight elevator hummed to a halt before its doors parted on a loft that felt less like an office, and more like a launch pad moments before ignition. The sight of the steel pylons on the distant bridge helped reinforce the impression.

Cables coiled across its polished concrete. Pelican cases, stamped FRAGILE / ASSET, formed hip-high canyons between folding workstations. A walnut conference table, so wide it seemed carved from some Redwood giant, occupied the center. By the north-facing glass, the skyline of lower Manhattan glowed; neon arteries pumping color into early-morning haze.

While the material chaos was bad enough, the human one was worse.

They were barely two dozen in the loft. Yet, the urgency of their agency was incredible to behold. One cluster was hurdled over a table, waving hands and fists in equal measure. A dozen others rushed about from one group to another, clutching papers and documents so hard they resembled the hundred others their legs kicked in their wake as they moved. One final cluster was against a wall, manning a server cluster that blinked so much red that Matt, for the briefest of moments, imagined he’d stepped across a time portal and landed inside the operations room of a nuclear bunker.

Matt Valt stood on the mezzanine that ringed the studio, tense hands gripping the steel handrail as if it were the only fixed object in a shifting world. Just a month ago he’d been eating instant noodles in a broken warehouse as he debugged translation lattices on a dented laptop. Now here he was with Milo Quinn the loanshark-cum-venture baron, having flown into the city just hours ago and now overlooking a floor outfitted with enough computing power to run a small exchange.

Below, Milo’s slim build emerged from a stairwell, his custom charcoal suit absorbing the fluorescence. Without looking up, he raised a finger in greeting. Matt interpreted the message to mean, 'watch, don’t interrupt.'

Matt exhaled and leaned forward, taking in the scene in pieces and bringing them together to make sense. Underneath the mess he was watching, order manifested the notion that the group below were no more than ‘hands’; techs and a little more handling the small stuff.

That sensation quickly prove true with the elevator chime ringing.

A youthful man in a navy blazer and black hoodie swept in first, trailing a two-wheeled carry-on plastered with airline priority tags. Without prompting, he picked a corner of the large table, plugged into a floor port, and unfold­ed a seventeen-inch monster of a laptop. On it, heat-maps exploded across the display. They appeared as pulses of red islands swallowed by green seas, the tell-tale signs of servers breathing in unison under simulated load.

His name, Matt had been told, was Raj Goyal, late of a streaming titan. Rumors said he’d kept their flagship app alive the night sixty million viewers tried to watch a single soccer final.

Matt pulled a worn notebook and scribbled: Hmm, a dying breed. Don’t think he will make the cut.

Close behind Raj came Alexi Petrov, her short figure angular in a smoked-gray jacket that might have been social-resistant. She set an aluminum briefcase on the walnut slab, cracked twin latches with the modulation of a safecracker, and removed five slim pouches lined with copper mesh. Labels stenciled in white read ECHOCORE-PROD-1 through 5. She laid them out in a perfect row, tapping each with a fingernail before moving on.

Matt frowned, watching her movements for a while before making a notch on his book: Redundant.

A burst of color trailing citrus perfume announced Marisol Ibanez. Neon-turquoise braids bounced against a chartreuse bomber as she surfed between crates, tablet held aloft like a torch. On its screen, wireframes morphed in real time as Hangul blocks slid into Devanagari loops, then melting into right-to-left Hebrew with mirrored UI elements that felt handcrafted rather than flipped. She pinched and zoomed, testing button hit-zones as if the icons possessed nerve endings.

Pointless... was the note that flanked the entrant as Matt quickly realized she and those like her would soon be replaced by his algorithm.

The freight door rolled again, this time disgorging a three-person camera crew shepherded by Sabine Arlo, a short, brightly dressed and loud woman whose Brooklyn drawl dumped consonants the way a drummer drops sticks. She choreographed her operators with flicks of two fingers, plotting a dolly track that would capture Raj’s dashboards, then pivot to Milo’s silhouette against the windows. “Day-zero documentary,” Matt overheard the woman say. “Founders in medias res. Audience watches the future happen, then hits install before the credits.”

Watching the team set themselves up, Matt didn’t even glance at his notebook. This was one entrant he was not qualified to eliminate. Instead, he took a few moments to review other notes on his pad.

Moments later the tempo shifted.

Crossing to Milo, Sabine made to give the somber man a hug and kiss on the cheek. Milo stepped back before contact could be made, only for the woman to swivel on her feet so quickly it could only be an instinctive reaction borne from experience. Almost without pause, she next trained her eyes towards Matt’s before a smile, all red lipstick and pearly whites, acknowledged him. When she went on to blow Matt a kiss, the edge of his lips quirked.

The last newcomer came with the hush of a closing door: Evelyn Dael was dressed in a trench coat, and had that air traveler’s fatigue hidden beneath her precise posture. Steel-gray eyes tracked moving bodies as she herself made a bee-line towards Milo’s position. Under one arm she held a folio thick with color-coded tabs: COMMERCE, DEFENSE, EU DIGITAL, DATA TRUSTS.

Evelyn shook Milo’s hand while holding a polite yet reserved smile. When she turned to Sabine though, she looked exasperated as she accepted the other woman’s hug, glaring at the other when she tried to tag her with her lips as well. She then glanced up at Milo, her eyes openly assessing the young man she was meeting in person for the first time.

Matt folded his little notebook and pocketed it; she too was someone he was not allowed to remark upon.

Milo clapped once, the sound ricocheting off glass. “Team,” he said, “get to work.”

~ Ѡ ~

A rolling ladder let Matt descend to ground level, where a rack tower waited half-wired and hungry. He cradled a one-unit blade server against his chest; it was the same chassis he had dragged through three airports. A coffee-brown smear near the handle betrayed an encounter with an overfilled mug weeks ago; he had refused to clean it though, knowing it added to his aura.

As he approached the massive table, Matt kept his eyes focused ahead, letting the strain of it add to the tension lines that substituted for the natural crows feet he lacked.

While Raj killed the overheads, a soft violet spill from the 5G node replaced fluorescent glare. Router arrays flared to life, green-gold LEDs lighting up in neat soldier rows. Marisol’s tablet fed the glow, showing a UI mock-up shimmering cerulean on ink black, now annotated in curling Malayalam script.

Matt slid the blade into the top slot. As he pushed, his reflection flashed across the brushed aluminum: the high cheekbones that had grown sharper during months of sleepless coding had lost some of their edge.

Enough remained the whole loft remained silent as they watched him move.

Matt depressed the power ribbon. Fans spun up with a hushed roar, and a BIOS code began its ascent down a tunnel of hexadecimals. On the main display, six vertical monitors stitched into a panorama before the Echocore icon appeared. This was a double-bar glyph that pulsed once per second, neon-white on midnight blue. Meant absolutely nothing to Matt; he’d done a doodle on a whiteboard just minutes before setting off for the first meet with Milo just over a month ago.

When both Milo and Dax asked about it, wondering at its meaning to the brilliant mind behind the invention, Matt adopted a pensive, far-off gaze before responding: “I don’t remember. It was so far back… doesn’t matter anyhow…”

Now, as Raj’s load simulator hit the API with a tsunami of traffic; the bar swayed before steadying, its frame-locked. Murmurs of approval slipped around the room as the silence was broken.

Next, characters flooded the terminal: hieroglyphic shards, runaway Cyrillic, upside-down Arabic, ASCII and Emoji snows. The torrent lasted three seconds, then stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He hit Ctrl-S, saving the dump to a temp directory, then closed the shell.

A thin rasp of breath escaped Matt. He tapped a desktop shortcut //scrambler-parse-BETA//dragged the fresh log into the window, and watched a progress bar crawl. Seconds passed. The output condensed into two clean lines of UTF-8: meaningless at first glance, but he recognized the checksum signature echoing the same long-short cadence. He copied the text into a notepad file, encrypted it, and pushed the laptop deeper under the stool.

Matt, satisfied at the small performance he’d just made, next heard Alexi pronounce the server “clean on inbound, filthy on outbound”. It sounded like a compliment.

Sabine, her Biro’s cap caught between her lips, was already sketching narrative arcs on a whiteboard: the world before Echocore, the pivot moment of discovery, the dawn of frictionless speech. Milo stood beside her, had arms folded, gaze drifting between whiteboard and rack tower.

Evelyn approached Matt, her heels silent against the concrete. Up close he noticed faint, airline-static in her hair; a microsecond’s flicker of fatigue behind the eyes.

“Raj says your model inference is clocking under thirty milliseconds at 512 tokens,” she said in a voice low enough to erase bystander curiosity. “I don’t speak the jargon, but apparently that makes you faster than DeepL.”

Pausing as she let an appreciative look flow over the much younger man, she added, “But it also makes you a bullet on certain antitrust slides. I would prefer being the one designing those slides. Makes my work easier without those skinny elbows of yours digging into my ribs.” The last was accompanied by a soft smile that couldn’t mask its edge.

“I have absolutely no intention of running anything,” Matt replied, opting to ignore the light provocation. “Politics isn’t my field.”

“Then consider me local weather,” Evelyn said, nodding her head with grace, adding, “Thank you.”

Sabine, holding a bullhorn she’d pulled out of nowhere, shouted, “Quiet on set!”

The camera crew angled lights toward Marisol, who launched into a demo of Echocore’s UI. She spoke in rapid Spanish, and a large display echoed her words instantly in French, then Swahili, then Japanese; each version stylized to match its language’s typographic flair. Even Alexi, wonder spread over her usually dour face, allowed a quick smile.

Matt watched Milo give a little jump as Sabine somehow managed to slide over to his side without her loud pumps alerting him. “They are gonna eat that shit up like its cereal,” she whispered, though Matt still caught it.

~ Ѡ ~

By dusk the first torrent of deliverables had slowed to a disciplined trickle. Contracts were drafted, Faraday pouches sealed prototypes, and Marisol’s color-scheme audits passed accessibility thresholds in twenty-six alphabets.

While the others debriefed around a catering station, Matt retreated to a quiet corner where Sabine intercepted and handed him a black hoodie. It was cotton with a minimalist logo: the same mirrored double-bar glyph silkscreened over the heart.

“Founders wear their own myth,” she said, making no attempt to hide her ogling the younger man so up close.

“I’m not a billboard.” Matt frowned, stepping back and eyeing the loft to see whether Milo was close at hand.

“We need it to shape your persona,” Sabine added, the playfulness in her eyes suddenly replaced by a solemnity that made Matt pause and listed. “Authenticity tastes stronger when the speaker looks under-caffeinated and semi-terrified. Tomorrow you’ll deliver one sentence on camera. Just twenty words, give or take. Make them ring, and the market writes the sequel for us.”

Then the moment passed as, mouth wide open with chewing gum pushed to the side, she gave him a wide wink.

Before Matt could retract within himself, Evelyn was by his side, flanking him with the other woman and flipping her folio open to the EU DIGITAL section.

“Actually, let’s keep it to fifteen words. Every extra syllable reduces the chance a French or Romanian subcommittee misquotes us.”

Matt blinked.

Milo stepped over from his call, slid a laminate badge into Matt’s pocket, and squeezed his shoulder. “Get some rest. Tomorrow will be busy.”

Matt managed a nod and wan grin, swiveling his head as he expected someone else to step up and nudge him further out into the deep.

That night, easing into the hotel’s bed that night, Matt groaned in both pleasure and irritation. Pleasure at the softness of the mattress, irritation at how the next few days would unfold.