Putting Together the Solution

He spent several hours a day over the next few weeks putting together this solution, that later would be mixed with lacquer and sprayed onto the circuit boards. By this time employees at Window were used to Golem tampering with products at the last minute. They looked upon him as at best eccentric and at worst as a lunatic, someone who the aliens had turned into a green biscuit long ago. They knew him as a secretive, compulsive, competitive person. Computer companies were by nature somewhat secretive in some areas, so people had learned to accept Golem’s secret changes to products. They wouldn’t question him when he told them to add a liter of his liquid to every one hundred liters of lacquer. He would tell them it was to improve the adhesion of the lacquer to certain materials used in the USB capture components. There would be no memo ever found that said that Golem told them to carry out the plan. Only CHarLie was fucking with the numbers in his mind. Four billion was pared down to four hundred million. CHarLie didn’t see the difference, but Golem would have had he been aware. He was human enough that he still cared about people. Some days now he would sit in the Mulberry and figure his life was fucked. He was now in charge of a dysfunctional institution that was working on its own solution to the population explosion, and it wasn’t exactly copper oxide infused condoms that it had in mind.