The Enigma Broker

The operations center contained an enormous amount of computing power and state-of-the-art technologies which allowed the R-Group to support their customers. Jacob was a highly skilled programmer by education and by practice. Petra, a world class encryption guru, had tutored him in the finer points of those practices since he had joined the R-Group.

Unlike Otto’s space, Jacob’s work area was highly task driven. ICABOD had sorted through the numerous log files and provided these to Jacob in hierarchal order for consideration. Three high definition screens, integrated to a single black surface-mount keyboard, responded to his every keystroke. The Adaptive Polymorphic Input Command and Kinetic System or APICKS was a black polymorphic surface engineered to ergonomically respond to hand size and finger length as well as hand angle of the individual, so they didn’t need to adjust anything in order to enter data from the keyboard.

The command lines of the console could just as easily take verbal commands rather than keystrokes, but Jacob preferred different modes of operation based on the task at hand. Using the keyboard allowed him to structure the logic internally before issuing the commands through keystrokes. The molded black surface had a toggle switch which allowed him to move quickly from one screen to the next, and the adaptive console responded by re-orienting its passenger to the proper screen if the action took more than a few seconds. Jacob had found it a little creepy at first, when the normally flat table began puffing up to suit the hand angle and then moving to accommodate his hand size. Once he was immersed into machine-code character, it seemed to suit him nicely.

The sounds that resulted from the interactions varied slightly from one screen to the other to help him correctly interact in each of the work areas. His work surface was clear of papers outside of the current task sheet he referenced. When the task was completed, Jacob provided electronic notification, then slid the task sheet into a shredder. He was working to eliminate the paper in total, but the requests came from so many places, and he totally refused to use email. That refusal to deal with email, along with prioritization and mid-task shifts, was sometimes best resolved with the paper at hand in his interrupt-driven role.

The speed, accuracy, and efficiency of his work results amazed both Petra and Quip to the point that, as long as his fingers were moving, they avoided bothering him unless an emergency arose. Instead of a door to his work area that he could close for privacy and quiet, he had amazing glove-soft leather covered earphones that allowed quiet intimacy with the machine response, on top of soft music in the background. The distractions were consequently non-existent for him, as well as for the others in the operations center. The leather on the earphones happened to match the color and texture of the chair he used. After a stint where he and Quip had worked on a problem for almost twenty hours straight, Quip had provided each of them with customized body-contoured chairs, complete with environmental controls for heating, cooling, and massaging. Jacob’s was the color of aged whiskey, Quip’s was buffed mahogany, and Petra’s was light pink as in a beginning blush. If needed, all of them could access instant messaging without destroying a workflow or task.

Each of the workspaces offered privacy for each of them with white noise walls yet was very open.