Hard Drive! a Silicon Valley High Tech Adventure Novel

Gordon sensed a presence at the office door behind his back, and felt a potent sexual aura through the Common Sense. It was Camille, the stunning blond. Gordon stood up with some difficulty because his legs had turned to Jell‑O, as usually happened when  near beautiful women. Seagate's president Tom had rehired Camille and promoted her to a senior position in marketing after he fired all the marketing men.

“You’re the best scientist at Seagate and I want to ask you a question about my platform in running for Scotts Valley City Council,” she said.

“Please have a seat. You're running for a council seat?” he said, thinking that she couldn't have much  chance of being elected to office in Scotts Valley since Al had been overruled by the City Council on a simple request to make his headquarters address “#1 Disc Drive.”

“I’m running for public office because I want to do something in my life that posterity will remember. Don’t you feel the same way?”

"Well, Andy Warhol said everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. I think I may have already had my fame accidentally, with Alluvial O. Fansome."

"Who or what is Alluvial O. Fansome?" Camille asked.

"He was born a half-century ago when I was a student at Caltech. I wanted to mail away for a Rosicrucian booklet called Mastery of Life that I saw in an advertisement in Popular Mechanics magazine. The ad said I would learn secrets of the ancient Templar Crusader Knights, the Holy Grail, and Freemasonry. I didn’t want to use my real name because my classmates would laugh at me when they saw the Rosicrucian booklet in my mailbox. An alluvial fan is an Earth feature I had just learned about in geology class.

"Alluvial is famous at Caltech today, fifty years later. He has a wife, a driver's license, gets junk mail, and has a web site at MySpace."

Camille decided to ignore this claim to geek fame. "I'm running for the council on an 'unlimited water' platform so new businesses can be started in Scotts Valley."

"How can that work, since Scotts Valley is entirely dependent on well water and the ground water levels have been dropping for years? That's why the city banned new businesses."

"A professor at Santa Clara University told me that water from the Sierra Nevada snow pack comes to Scotts Valley through an underground aquifer. The locals here don't know about that."

"Sierra mountain runoff water does flow into the California Central Valley, but then it would have to flow uphill over the Temblor Range on the west side of the valley, then down into the Santa Clara Valley, and finally uphill again over the Santa Cruz mountains to Scotts Valley." As he said this it dawned on him that if he didn’t stop talking this dazzling lady would leave.

"That's hundreds of miles for the water to travel, and might seem unlikely except for another discovery at Santa Clara University," he quickly added. "On their campus near the Faculty Club is a monument for the first airplane flight."

"You mean by the Wright brothers?" she asked.

"No, I mean by John J. Montgomery, who flew a glider across that whole distance from the Sierra Nevada to Santa Clara. And if someone could glide that far over those mountains without an engine, water should be able to go that far too," Gordon whitely lied. By then, he had collected some of his wits and wasn’t about to tell her that Montgomery had actually just bailed out in a hang glider from a hot air balloon floating over Santa Clara University, and his determined but inaccurate wife had put up the monument after his death.

Camille paused, thought for a few seconds, and finally nodded. "Please let me ask you another question. As a scientist," she said hesitatingly, "may I ask if you believe in God?"

Gordon wondered how to answer this without distorting the truth. She thought she was asking a question in the context of her ordinary human space-time experience, but she was actually asking about the deeper reality it arose from.

“I’m a very ordinary engineer and scientist,” he slowly replied, “but I happen to be excellent at applying the scientific method. I’m able to disregard the assumptions that people are taught from birth, as the scientific method requires on a question like you’re asking.

“My answer to you is that I don’t fight the truth. God is as real and present here and now, as the sky above us and the Earth below.”

This seemed to surprise her, and she again hesitated. “But if God is here, how can He allow evil, murder, and death?”

Gordon pondered how to answer truthfully in spite of her space-time illusion, and it occurred to him to use a parable. He smiled, remembering that Jesus often spoke in parables in the Bible.

“Imagine a mother watching her small children playing outside in her yard. She’s working in her kitchen and keeping her eye on them through a window. They’re playing Cops and Robbers.

“‘Bang! Bang!’ shouts her son. Her daughter holds her hands to her chest, falls down on the lawn, and lies still. But the mother smiles, knowing her daughter will soon rise up again and be well.”

“Camille, think and see: there is no death.”

He saw recognition come into her eyes.

---From "Hard Drive!"

Al Fansome

at myspace.com/alfansome