When we last looked at our protagonist (or, depending on your view, the antagonist), he was busy digging under his house.

Lee thanked the HVAC technician for inspecting the ductwork.

“And you say everything is in good working condition?”

“Yes sir. We replaced the torn ducts and repaired the few holes we found. We suggest you get the plastic on the ground redone. Also, the insulation in crawlspaces is no longer recommended.”

Lee nodded. “Anything else?”

The technician shook his head.

Lee wrote a check for services rendered and watched the technician back out of the driveway.

He smiled.

Three HVAC technicians had surveyed and worked in the crawlspace. Two crawlspace reparation salesmen had carefully measured and photographed the crawlspace for potential work.

None of them, not a single one, had seen the entrance to the cave network that coursed under Lee’s house and stored the parts, shelving and equipment for the new supercomputer.

Lee put on his gloves and unlocked the crawlspace door.

Once inside, he donned his welder’s goggles and “moon suit.”

A few adjustments, a couple of dial twists and Lee continued vaporizing the Alabama clay from around the cave entrance, making room for a rack of prewired mobile phone-based servers that would be the core brain of the supercomputer.

Although the vaporizer was noiseless, the occasional flash of light illuminated and disturbed the wildlife in the cavelike jungle of the crawlspace.

Camel crickets leapt from the walls to piles of pink insulation. Spiders, their shadows bigger than crows, spun long silk tendrils, hoping for a single cricket to feed an egg case bulging with new babies.

And, crouched in the crook of a leg of ductwork, a hybrid mouse, a long-lost experiment from the previous supercomputer, observed and counted, calculating the next flash of light, guesstimating the distance to the next hiding place, wanting to escape and breed, recreating the network of beings that were able to beat any silicon-based computing system at future forecasting, farming ants as combination algorithms/data points.