A commitment to total secrecy between each separate department of Headquarters ensured none of the building's countless mirrored windows faced one another.
It meant HQ was a masterpiece of architecture: a huge polyhedron of inordinate planes that quick-flashed the westering sun's rays in sequence, glinting by degrees like a cut jewel.
Each window - one per office - was periscoped for extra security. The token chink of light offered to Gresley bounced twice down a tube of mirrors, refracting onto the floor just short of his drawing board. His desk wouldn't move to compensate. The room's entirety - fixtures, fittings and furniture, seemed carved from one piece of white plastic material, without sign of vacuum seal or joint.
Everything emerged from the walls, floor and ceiling as if part of the same sculpture. Indeed, that rogue Jedson had suggested the building was as one: A huge lump of a thing, not built from the ground up, but airdropped in by dozens of straining helicopters one night, when no-one was around to see it. Designed to prevent anyone determining HQ's dimensions.
True enough, there was nothing on the interior, not even fire escape maps, to give clue to its overall shape, number of employees, or purpose.
HQ's approach roads went underground miles before reaching the building's perimeter. Workers like Gresley drove to reserved spaces in vast underground parking lots before taking escalators, travelators and lifts to their particular colour coded zone.
Arriving five minutes before his shift started, Gresley would take out his packed lunch and fortify himself for the day ahead; a quick shot of hot chocolate before following a series of blue arrows on the floor to his office.
Escalator, travelator, lift. The same routine every day. Held on course so that only his mind could wonder, as it had this morning back to those first meetings years ago with Jedson.
"What do you think you're in? Green, Blue, Black?" he'd asked. "Sure, that limited palette's fine for navigating the wires and lines of a tube map or junction box, but don't you realise that the sheer enormity of this place demands infinite other shades - one for each separate department? You'll be aquamarine or something like that. Imagine a Monopoly game featuring every street in London; the colours it would take, and you'd still be nowhere near the size of it. There're thousands of us. Don't you realise?"
And did he? Gresley hadn't decided. Before meeting Jedson he'd always just got on with things: fulfilling the new directives that landed from somewhere on his desk every few months, setting to work on his piece of the jigsaw - building a simple circuit board or solving a series of equations; one of many working on a chaos of small tasks that were being rationalised under some unseen plan; contraptions growing within a series of ever-larger rooms until huge machines lay like cadavers - snatched for the surgeon's accuracy - in some central chamber, and...
Now then. That was Jedson talking. And that wouldn't do. Gresley needed this job. But maybe he was prepared to believe some of what the old loon said after all. Maybe HQ did have thousands of other departments - the colour designation from one to the next too subtle for the naked eye, but recognised instantly by whatever supercomputer, cameras and scanners oversaw the imperative separation of someone working in aquamarine 12 from someone working in aquamarine 13.
Maybe he did believe that he wasn't in 'Blue' as such, but a cyan, bondi or azure. And maybe it did make sense that HQ recognised - in the infinite scope of the spectrum - a preferable system for partition than those numbers and mathematics that hackers proved finite, prone and breakable every day.
But was that really what he was working on? Code breaking equipment? Weaponry? Hacking devices? He couldn't be sure, because Jedson, for all his revelations, had a habit of taking the truth too far. His last being that HQ understood a closed system's vulnerability well enough to outsource its own security codes to nature, wiring its computers to correlate feedback data from a lab's-worth of persistent mysteries, integrating the rotations of their ciphers with the infinite vacillations of a bee's wing or wave's dissipation, so that anyone hoping to access the network would first have to crack these prevailing questions of science: experiments without end that continued in perpetuity in petri dishes, particle accelerators, wet rooms and wind tunnels somewhere within HQ's vast, mysterious structure.
Gresley put down the circuit board and slurped from his mug - the one moveable object at his disposal, apart from stationary, set square, and the curious brown fluids that gushed in two shades: light (coffee) and lighter (tea-ish), from an integrated drinks machine on the wall.
He wondered whether an oblivious colonel - who may or may not have existed somewhere in the building - had a greater choice of flavours. Hot chocolate perhaps.
Mary had made him a flask every morning for the past six years.
God, all that time ago now since he'd joined HQ as an 18-year-old apprentice. His red hair not quite so thin back then, his outlook not quite so jaded.
Having forgotten to mention it for the first few weeks, it was now far too late to tell Mary that all foreign objects were banned. Instead, he took the flask with a kiss and left it in his car. He'd found such deceptions came naturally, being on the receiving end of so many himself.
Deceptions. HQ was set up to maintain them. There was no opportunity to fraternise; to talk and perhaps theorise as to what everyone here was actually building.
Everyone in HQ ate their meals in their offices, purchasing food from a small trolley bus that orbited the building's large, blank corridors at 12noon precisely, programmed to stop with a beep outside each office door halfway through one's shift.
Here it was now. And was that all? 2am? It felt like is should be at least 4. Gresley let its 45 second waiting time elapse and listened to it whir on down the hall. He hated the food, but never minded working nights, which was a good job since everyone now had to do their stint. This new rule: that for extra security, nobody of the same colour sector was allowed to work the same shift, and were instead assigned one of the 288 clocking-in times that existed for each five minutes of the 24 hour day.
Sure, it would come round eventually: your turn to work the dream 9 to 5 shift and feel like a regular person again. But tomorrow you'd be on 9.05 until 5.05, then 9.10 till 5.10. Then before you knew it you were working the nights again. The system ensured no two employees ever walked to or from their offices together. Five minutes was enough to clear the escalators, travelators and lifts before the next worker arrived behind.
Gresley paced nervously back and forth to the drinks machine. The equations and components he was given to work with might be as useful in a bomb as an alarm clock. He just couldn't guess their future application without Jedson's insight. But tonight he would find out. And what would he have done without Jedson? Been happier perhaps. Would he trade the burden of knowledge to return to blissful ignorance? Possibly.
Jedson was in charge of the psychometric tests each prospective employee was forced to sit: A set of multiple choice questions designed to ensure one's personality matched the requisite algorithm for employment - ascertained by whether you would A: Bury the road kill even though you didn't run it over, iii: Lie in order to make the sale, 5: Kill the fox to save two chickens, V: Believe in God or a god.
And so on.
Jedson had the run of the sectors, but he still couldn't afford to let meetings look obvious. Quick updates on the truth could be relayed in the few seconds it took to pass each other while one was stopped to tie a shoelace, or hand back something the other had accidentally dropped. But longer conversations demanded planning - a pretense that afforded Jedson time to relay the particulars.
Car trouble was the answer, but it was getting beyond a joke. Over the last month Gresley's brand new hatchback had encountered every teething problem imaginable, until the faults had come full circle until here they were again - Gresley replacing the punctured tyre with the same flat he'd removed to the boot only last week.
"We're gonna have to get you a real old banger or something. Or a knife. This just looks obvious," whispered Jedson, bending down to help Gresley loosen the wheel nut.
"I like this car. And if you think I'm going to slash my own tyres for the sake of realism you've got another thing..."
Gresley broke off to watch a large black saloon drive silently into the lot. It parked a way over and turned off its lights. Jedson waited but nobody got out.
"Consider this, my friend," he carried on. "Those nearer the centre of HQ have windows, of sorts. The light that lights your outlying room is just periscoped even further inwards - a great network of mirrors carrying the sun's rays within to the centre of the building."
Gresley kept listening, the wheel nuts loosening and tingling onto the tarmac.
Jedson sped his words excitedly, talking between gritted teeth as if he was struggling not to shout the news aloud.
"OK, Gresley. I hope you're ready for this."
Jedson looked round toward the saloon and continued.
"They're designing a system, see, to periscope natural light across the planet. It'll halve worldwide electricity consumption. I've spoken to the scientists. It will be enough to stem the rising tides before it reaches tipping point. Massive reflective conduits will run beneath the sea-bed, emerging either side of the earth in a countless array of mirrored tubes; ever dividing like the branches of a tree into every household. No-one will ever need to turn on a light again - only open a small hatch and unleash light through their homes. Imagine it - daylight reflected underground from beyond the horizon; from wherever it's already tomorrow. Sunshine from beyond the earth's curve, mirrored into each room of your house! "
"Incredible. Light on tap?"
"As if it were gas or water or electricity! But we've got to act now. We've got to get the blueprints out Gresley."
"Why? I mean, why the rush? Jedson, I think we're being watch..."
"...Because they're going to sell the technology as a weapon," Jedson interrupted, nodding to the saloon. "I've seen the accounts. It's worth more to them as a bloody weapon. There's a prototype somewhere. They're taking bids. All that focused heat. They've realised it can bring down aircraft, satellites, missiles. Great alibi you see? Solar wind, abnormal radiation. Nobody argues against the quirks of the universe. Whoops, it's gone! Wasn't us! You see, lasers are traceable, but the power of the sun is so obviously non-manmade."
Gresley's car landed with a jolt. He got in and started the engine.
A knock at the window.
"Here, in the morning. 6am sharp. I'm going to crash into the back of you. You can notebook the details as if you were taking my insurance details. I'll take care of the security passes."
The black saloon approached, flicking its headlights to full beam. Jedson, squinting, turned to jog away, shouting over his shoulder: "No problem buddy, hope you make it home OK."
Gresley wound up the window and sped off. On his way home he stopped in a lay-by, watching the sun come up as he drank the rest of his chocolate; steadying his hand to dial home and hear Mary's voice on the answering machine. She would be on her way to work already. Maybe she wouldn't see him again.
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