I had pondered the indignity of rushing home from my three-day honeymoon (a quickie weekend of hiking, fondue, and abrupt, weird passion) to sit blindly at some board meeting where my presence would be neither helpful nor welcome. Particularly annoying was the fact that the meeting was going to take place on the second floor of my new house, and I couldn’t even get away.
Then I realized how petty I sounded. This was Sascha’s turf, and his home was his workplace. I was his wife. We hadn’t signed a prenuptial agreement or anything, and I didn’t have a legal right to his business, no matter what he did with it. So I softened up my rigid thinking by imagining that I had married someone from a foreign country where the natives looked something like me but not really, and where about 50% of the dialect would be familiar, but interspersed with strange barbaric terms. And I was privileged enough to have the whole country come to me! I didn’t even need to board an airplane or get a yellow fever shot.
This fantasy made things much easier.
Sascha and I hung out in the living room waiting for the Deus Ex board to show up. The early morning Fall sunlight was spectacular, especially through the psychedelic stained glass. We lay on the oriental rug like cats. I watched the reflections of passing cars cross over the ceiling mouldings. The builders of these monuments to Victorian excess really had some good ideas when it came to the sheer sensuality of living in a place.
Ariadne, the administrative assistant, was the first person to come over. She was a frail Celtic redhead, with long bright curls reaching the tiny waistband of her Indian print skirt. Her eyes were luminous blue and suspicious. She walked with a limp.
I sat up properly. Sascha stretched and moaned in a way that made me very embarrassed for him. "Hi Ariadne," he said, infinitely pleasant. "Thanks for coming early. I’m glad you thought about our talk a couple of weeks ago---remember, it’s really important that you not be the last one who comes in in the morning."
Ariadne forced a tiny stiff smile. "Thank you," she said in a tinkly little harpsichord voice. "I see that you have your soulmate living here already." She frowned. "Isn’t that a little soon, Sascha?"
"Where have you been? We got married last week! You should know that. Everybody in Cambridge knows it, practically."
"Like in a het, property-oriented, phallofascist ceremony?"
"Yeah," said Sascha. "It was cool. We’re getting big capitalist presents from my parents."
"Good Goddess," said Ariadne. "Were they there? Sascha, I thought you were one of the Tribe. But you have this weird addiction to societally approved monogamous relationships. Couldn’t you just have gotten handfasted for a year and a day instead?"
Sascha’s AA was mouthing off at him this way? What kind of bullshit was this? I poked him.
"Ariadne, can you please get us some coffee before the meeting starts?" he asked, a bit too gently, I thought.
"Well, at least you’re paying me to do it, instead of sending your chattel to do it for you." I gaped. She turned to me, looking into my face for the first time.
"Isn’t it nice that Sascha married a normal, conventional, able-bodied woman? Your name is Sara? I guess you’ve had a nice, normal life, haven’t you Sara? I guess you don’t know what it’s like to be a disabled Marxist/Pagan lesbian and a survivor of ritual abuse."
"You’re right. I don’t."
"Get the coffee, Ariadne," said Sascha. "Everybody is supposed to be here by 8:30."
Ariadne left on her little three-speed bicycle. Sascha already seemed to have forgotten his altercation with her. "What the hell was that?" I asked acidly.
"That? That’s Ariadne. I hired her as a favor to a friend. She’s not a very good employee. But she’s had a hard life, and I should do my part to keep up the last remnants of Affirmative Action in this country."
"I hope I don’t have to deal with her too much. Who’s the friend? Or am I better off not knowing?"
"Ariadne was involved with Crystal for a while," Sascha explained. "Neither of them had jobs. I couldn’t really hire Crystal for a number of reasons. Besides, I had recently pulled her out of jail and there are only so many favors I can do for one person at a time. Also, she doesn’t stick around in one place for very long. But Ariadne needed work, so I hired her. Like I said, she’s not who I would have picked under ordinary circumstances, but at least she’s free to be herself here."
I rolled my eyes.
"Why are you being so nasty and judgmental? Please respect my community, Sara. We don’t judge people based on what god or Goddess they worship, or what they wear, or who they sleep with."
"Do I get to meet this infamous Crystal?"
"I’m not sure you want to. Not yet, anyway. I love Crystal dearly, but you’re clearly having some trouble getting adjusted to our group, and she’s sometimes a little much to take. I’ve heard some rumors she’s in town, though. She might not know I got married, so it’s possible she’ll drop by unannounced. She’s been voice-printed to unlock the front door and get in the house."
The front door opened. I jumped around. It turned out to be Drexler, already bouncing with bon vivance this early in the morning.
Albert Drexler was a happy-go-lucky programmer, oenophile and mycologist, and fan of art rock. His hair and beard were black, bushy, and vaguely reminiscent of some turn-of-the-century Lothario, except for the dramatic white streaks he had bleached through both. His love of pleasure was as intense as his love of the intense. His romantic history had become deeply ingrained in the mythology of Deus Ex Machina Software and the various MIT-alum-oriented mailing lists the company kept on its server:
Around eight years earlier, when Drexler (drex@ex.com) was a senior at MIT, his steady girlfriend broke up with him. Drexler was devastated. He retired to his dorm room in Senior House, where he took a tab of acid every day for seven days and played Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon over and over until his CD player gave out. On the eighth day, his girlfriend came back to him. They are still together. This simple act of successful desperation raised Drexler from the status of weenie to Man of Principle. To this day, inheritors of Drexler’s dorm room commemorate his romantic success by never removing his Pink Floyd poster and by always maintaining a hefty supply of acid on the premises.
Drexler, who was quite likable despite his pretentious goofiness, thought I was beautiful. He had had never missed an opportunity to tell me as much during the three or four times we had met. "Sa-ra, my elegant femme, how lovely to see the morning graced with your exquisite face," he said, bowing low and kissing my hand enthusiastically. "Are you joining us this morning?"
Weenie, I thought, flattered nevertheless. "Yeah. Sascha thinks it’s important for me to see the company at work. He thinks I might have something to contribute. I can’t see how."
"We can look at you. You will soothe our stress," said Drexler. "We’ll see you in the boardroom, my lady." He flounced upstairs.
"Guess you had a good time at Renaissance Faire this weekend," Sascha shouted after him. "Drex wanted to know if we were going to have an open marriage," he said in a low voice.
"So he could get his hands on me? Jesus Christ. What did you tell him?"
"I said it was too soon for us to decide."
I didn’t have much time to think about this. The big front door swung open again, and I found myself confronted with a gaggle of hackers, who streamed by me in a bizarre parody of the receiving line I had thankfully missed at the wedding.
Most of the Deus Ex Machina inner circle I had met once or twice; a couple people, like Toby and Crete, the two part-timers who did QCs, I was seeing for the first time. Sascha had provided me with brief personality snapshots beforehand, so I knew who I was dealing with:
Ian McCullough (ian@ex.com): programmer and chief techie and security guy. Deliberately celibate. Rode a unicycle. Skinny, blond ponytail, little scrubby beard, glasses, sneakers. Ian meditated a lot and imported Odwalla juices from California. He was the one who had treated me so icily the first time Sascha had taken me to Casa Deus, and his behavior didn’t seem so different now. Also, I had heard he was a special stickler for precision, both in computers and in life at large; at the company he had worked for before Deus Ex Machina, he had set fire to a box of brochures containing an inaccurate description of an important technical word. He had burned them in the building’s foyer, during business hours, with the door open so that the fire department wouldn’t come. No one fired him. They needed him around too much.
Kenji ("Catfood") Okara: programmer and chief social engineer. Kenji’s nickname (and email address---catfood@ex.com) was based on his favorite snack food: dry kitty treats. ("Meow Mix is preferable to Friskies," he was known for saying. "Stay away from the Iams. It’s like eating granola.") Catfood was accorded a great deal of respect for this idiosyncrasy; in general, most eccentricities, as long as they didn’t hurt other people, were considered to be somewhere between benign and impressive. Otherwise he was pretty ordinary, although a little fruity, well-dressed in an expensive Japanese way, and more than a recreational smoker of clove cigarettes. But above all, Catfood had an amazing ability: Over the telephone, he could become anyone he chose. Back at MIT, he had impersonated a pretty good dean. These days, he was more likely to pose as an electrical inspector or an employee of a competing company. Catfood was indispensable.
Cass Frick, also known as Frick (frick@ex.com): dependable workhorse programmer. Short, with long black hair and aviator glasses. Alumni rep for the MITSFS, the largest science fiction library in the country. Frick wasn’t really that overweight, but there was something about her body shape and the way she dressed (dumpy jeans and T-shirts) that accentuated neither her attractiveness nor her femininity. In any case, Frick didn’t seem to care. She had won a sexual harassment suit in graduate school, and henceforth never felt like doing anything that might provoke further stress. She arrived at the meeting in her usual garb: giant backpack, leather biker jacket, and 1970’s-style Southern rock and roll hat. Frick did not approve of me. She pursed her thin lips and looked icily at me from behind her thick lenses. Sascha hadn’t talked to her about her feelings directly, but he had heard some second-hand gossip about how unhappy Frick was that Sascha had married outside the community.
Last to arrive were Jonathan and Wendy Marshall (jvm@ex.com; wsm@ex.com). This morning they were minus their progeny, Tuathà Starchild. They had rollerbladed over from their condo on Inman Street a half-mile or so away, and they were wearing matching purple silk running shorts and T-shirts from some mountain bike trip. Both of them were handsome, long-haired, dark, horsy, and significantly taller than both of us.
Jonathan had been Sascha’s partner in the genesis of Deus Ex Machina Software. They had known each other tangentially at MIT, but not well until the end of Sascha’s tenure there, when he had been seduced from the straight life and started going to the never-ending series of underground parties and science-fiction "cons."
A couple of years after graduation, in between ridiculously high-paid consulting gigs, Sascha finished Communicate, as the product was originally known. He then discovered that no company would buy it for anything close to what it was worth; the technology was so new and the 1989 recession so bad that no one wanted to risk supporting it.
Sascha decided to go it solo. He recruited Jonathan to help him whip up some capital for his new company. Jonathan had stayed on for graduate school at the Institute’s Media Lab, specializing in multimedia. He was also a laid-back, pleasant guy. Jonathan’s stability was instrumental in getting the company on its feet; Sascha was afraid that his own reputation would prevent people from applying to be DEM programmers. People knew Jonathan, and respected him. He wasn’t a dynamic leader, but he could recruit people, and keep them fed and happy. Jonathan ended up conscripting Ian, Drexler, Catfood, and Frick, the nucleus of the Deus Ex Machina staff. All of them were well-off enough to work for stock instead of paychecks for a few months, and all were enthusiastic about the project. Jonathan had kept the group together in subsequent years despite Sascha’s micromanagement and alternating bouts of hysteria and depression.
Jonathan and Sascha had never ended up being close personal friends. Jonathan had some doubts about Sascha’s stability and, while he wasn’t prideful, hated to constantly play Al Gore to his partner’s Bill Clinton. But it was hard to tell that they weren’t close; in the early days of Deus Ex Machina, there was no difference between home and work.
The two had spent nearly 80 hours a week in close communication. There had been no such things as private phone calls. Often, Jonathan and Sascha had slept on the floor. Sometimes their girlfriends came over to sleep with them. Sometimes strange things would happen at night. Then they’d get up in the morning and work again.
Ultimately, their lack of true friendship had saved Deus Ex Machina from self-destruction. This was when Wendy discovered, after the 30th breakup or so with Sascha, that she was pregnant, and that the baby’s father was probably, although by no means definitely, Jonathan.
Sascha claimed that the situation would have been much worse had he felt betrayed by a friend rather than one-upped by a co-worker. He (narrowly) avoided suicide by forcing himself to think of Jonathan as just another Deus Ex hacker. He was thus able to bear being the best man at Jonathan and Wendy’s wedding, and to accept that Wendy was at last in love with someone who was at least as tall and as firmly planted in the physical (and sexual) world as she; Sascha had failed miserably on both counts. And Starchild was just another baby. Everyone thought it wisest not to muck around with DNA testing, and none of Sascha’s Wiccan friends had been able to divine that she bore any trace of Strathmore blood. That was just fine with him.
We all went upstairs to the conference room on the second floor, carrying our coffeecups, which Ariadne had managed to bring back without spilling. Ariadne herself wouldn’t drink coffee; number one it was a drug, and number two coffee manufacturers exploited oppressed workers, she said.
What must once have been the drawing room or perhaps the master bedroom of 86 Magazine Street was now the Casa Deus boardroom. The space was dominated by the magnificent walnut table. In its previous life, I was told, this piece of furniture had been the boardroom table at the late Strathmore Steel Co. The table was carved out of a single piece of dark wood---some majestic tree must have lost its life quite tragically to manufacture it. Too big to fit through any door, it had been lifted by crane through a broken-out wall during the first major renovations at Casa Deus (after ExCom 1.0 shipped, and Sascha was flush with cash). There was a brass bullet embedded in its center.
Sascha propped his bare feet on the table and opened up his laptop. Everyone else grabbed their own laptops out of their bags. As their hands hit the table, it vibrated a little with the almost-in-unison clicks of metal hitting wood. This noise was produced by the assembled collection of MIT class rings---affectionately known as "brass rats"---that many loyal MIT alums attach to their bodies for all eternity. All of the Deus Exers, including Sascha, were members of the Brass Rat Pack.
"Here’s the story," Sascha said. "We have a problem. We’re not growing fast enough. I’m sure it’s my fault. I’ve waited too long to get second-round funding for the company, and now we’re behind. I don’t know if you guys heard about Todd’s company. It got bought out by one of the big guys a few weeks ago. Todd thought it was a good deal. Everybody got fired yesterday, and the parent company stole all Todd’s customers and technology. Todd never got second-round funding either. It’s grow or die."
Sascha’s announcement was followed by a few seconds of dark silence.
"Well, if nobody wants to talk, I’d like to lay out my plan," said Will, the new marketing guy, whose pleasant conventionality---pressed slacks, cologne, neat, short hair, and overuse of peppy motivational clichés---was a little shocking in this group. Will was a Microsoft expatriate; why he had left the security of the Big One and let himself be recruited by a bunch of old-school Unix hackers was anyone’s guess. Nor was I quite sure, nor were some of his new co-workers, why Sascha and Jonathan had made their unprecendented dive into Bill Gates’ personnel harem and fetched him out.
Next to him, Will had a copy of the book Managing Technical Professionals, which struck me as about as futile as an on-duty zookeeper reading about managing wild tigers.
Will was the company’s seventh or eighth attempt at a marketing and sales director. All previous marketing people had failed for one of two reasons: they were either too mainstream, or "vanilla," to understand the people they were representing, or else they were too much like the people they represented to hold much credibility with corporate buyers.
The same held true for the Deus Ex Machina PR department; in fact there wasn’t one at this point. Of the two people who had been running it three or four months earlier, one had quit and one had been fired. Sascha had made some noise about me helping with PR; I had thus far demurred, not wanting to kill his baby with my woeful inexperience.
"What this product needs is a bigger market presence for companies just getting into the groupware arena," Will continued brightly. "I think we need more trade shows, more magazine ads, more items with the company logo on it---"
"Like coffee mugs or something?" yawned Ian. "I must have 30 coffee mugs in my kitchen cabinet from computer companies. Twenty of them are already out of business. Not very good odds."
"How about hip long-sleeve T-shirts with a hologram for an insignia? We can give them away when people order demos of the product," offered Will.
"Jesus Christ, Will," said Wendy. That’s so last year. Plus you can tell we have the big bucks to spread our name on acres of cotton, right?"
"How about matching black and silver condoms and diaphragms?" said Drexler.
"Or bumper stickers that say ‘ExCommunicate 3.0: F2F with the Devil," Catfood suggested.
"How about we make the front of the jewel box look like blotter paper?" asked Jonathan, tipping back in his chair. "And our really good customers can get their CDs front-loaded."
Everybody laughed except for Will. "I think that might be illegal," he said nervously.
"Especially the ones going to the CIA!" howled Drexler.
The CIA was one of DEM’s major customers. Apparently the Agency was one of the few organizations that could afford the hardware necessary to run the thing.
Back in 1990, Jonathan’s father, who had connections in Washington, had hooked up Jonathan and Sascha with a purchasing agent at the CIA. The two put on suits and demonstrated Communicate, the prototype of ExCom. The CIA had been developing a similar internal program to use on its analysts’ workstations. But the Agency was already three million dollars over budget on R & D, with no end in sight.
While Sascha and Jonathan didn’t like the idea of being defense contractors, they nevertheless tailored ExCom 1.0 to the CIA’s specifications, and the CIA immediately became their most loyal, and lucrative, customer. Over the long run, it had almost been worth the suspected phone taps.
Sascha stopped laughing. "Do I hear some extraneous line noise?" he complained. "We have to talk about expanding our market. Otherwise we’re facing company core dump, big time. Undergraduate humor is not helping here.
"Right now, it’s cozy having control over everything. But cozy doesn’t mean money. 2.0 did OK, but we’re really strung out for cash flow until the big dollars for 3.0 start coming in. We spent way fucking too much on R&D, incidentally. 3.0 is going to do really well from all outside indications. But we don’t have enough tech support to cover questions, or programmers to do bug fixes, or enough people in the remote offices. And we can’t hire any personnel without money. Which we don’t have. Any suggestions?"
"I don’t like the idea of outsiders having the power to control what we do," said Ian. "Even if they’re people in the computer industry---even if they’re people we know personally---I don’t want their money thrown around to make us change how we work. Ignorance and money is a bad combination."
"I hear you," said Sascha. "But no growth, no company. Period. Think of how many software companies folded this year. Think of how many were bought out by big conglomerates who don’t even care about Unix or the hacker philosophy."
"Lots of new companies are starting also," said Will.
"Yeah, but they’re all doing Internet stuff. Or worse, creating software for Windows," sneered Jonathan. "I don’t particularly want to sell my ass to Microsoft. I’d wake up one morning in Redmond, overlooking Lake Washington and finding out that all the apps ExCom runs have been beta-morphed---they’ve had their innards ripped out to make room for Microsoft Foundation Classes. I couldn’t face myself in the mirror after that. Plus my folks in Spokane would want to visit us all the time."
"I don’t think Windows is so bad," protested Will. "I run it on my PC at home."
"Well, duh," said Drexler.
"Also, pretty soon most servers are going to be running Windows NT," Will continued. "Windows is going to be pretty much a default setting. Nobody is installing new Unix systems---they’re just legacy apps. If I had any say, I’d suggest you make your next version of ExCommunicate Windows-compatible."
"Who hired you, please?" asked Drexler sharply, pulling on his beard. "There’s an old Unix saying, ‘Small is beautiful’. I didn’t labor nights in those Project Athena clusters at MIT just so I could leech off of the success of some pessimal K-Mart software. Feh!"
"I think getting outside funding is an excellent idea," said Frick quietly, underneath her big hat. "We have too much responsibility right now---what if one of us wants to leave or something?"
Catfood laughed. "You? Frick leaving? No, honey. You’re going to be one of those old farts getting a gold digital watch when you retire from here."
"I didn’t mean me, necessarily," said Frick huffily. "There are just---well, there are just some people who might not want to stay here forever...or maybe one of us might like to take less responsibility for big decisions, and just hack code instead. Companies do exist where the programmers aren’t also the majority stockholders."
"We’re not one of those companies," said Sascha.
During this exchange, Jonathan was setting up the big workstation to send real-time audio to the New York office. "We’re meeting right now," he said through the little microphone to the person at the other end. "Can you join us? We want to find out what you’ve sniffed out about funding."
The New York office---one woman still in her bathrobe---slumped down at the videocamera. "I’m putting the written part on my screen right now," she grumbled. "Can you read it?"
The screen split in two. The left half was the woman’s face; the right was a text document. "I’ve talked to people on both coasts," she said. "You have three potential takers, but they have some legitimate concerns. I’ve gotten them written down here; go ahead and make comments on the online page.
"First off, some of your likely investors are a little concerned that you don’t want to move more into the ‘90s. Someone who knows you personally---I won’t say who---said that you all still think it’s 1988, in terms of your corporate culture and how you view programming and also---and I hate to say this, guys---in terms of your personal lives. I mean, some of you are notorious. One funder turned us down flat, mentioning something about a panel that Sascha did at a certain trade show while tripping.
"Industry insiders figure that Deus Ex Machina is one of the most across-the-board countercultural companies. That’s starting to be a big problem for people who were there with us in the ‘80s and are now growing up. I’m not saying this personally, so don’t blame the messenger. But I’ve heard from a number of sources that you guys have a rep for being eternal undergraduates who won’t take personal responsibility for anything you do. Being acid-chomping technopagans is sort of cute for the kids trying to emulate the ‘60’s---you must read some magazines besides Information Week or Technology Today that talk about this---but you guys are 30 now and you might consider acting mature before asking people to trust you with their investments. People are worried that your top programmer will have a bad trip and have to leave the company or something. Frankly, this may be the pin that pops the Deus Ex Machina balloon. Sorry to bum out your morning."
Jonathan was typing his notes in the margin of the New York woman’s text. "I understand what you’re saying," he said, frowning.
"Why don’t they just fucking let us be?" complained Sascha. "I’m a great businessman. I’m a great programmer. It’s synergistic. We’re one of the top groupware and top multimedia companies in the country. Don’t these people know that ExCom’s highly optimized core was the result of an inspiration I had while tripping? Who the fuck cares? You can’t drug-test software. It’s a tool. We put out a top-notch app and we support it well. It doesn’t matter what we do in our free time. What matters is that the program works. Is the software industry turning that puritanical?"
"It’s not the software industry, Sascha," she sighed. "It’s the banks who give the second-round funding. The three companies that offered funding aren’t even banks. They’re other software firms that want privileged access to the ExCom technology in return for the cash."
"Precisely," interjected Ian. "That’s not an investment. It’s the sale of our most bloody valuable asset!"
Will leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. "The customers are a company’s most valuable asset. They don’t get obsolete. Microsoft understands that: When Digital was a failing company, it partnered with Microsoft to run Windows NT on its Alpha super workstations. DEC’s had a string of profitable quarters since."
Drexler put his head in his hands. "Fire him," I saw him mouth to Sascha.
"Oh. One more thing," the woman in New York said. "The people I interviewed are getting skittish about products coming out of the East Coast. I know Digital’s back on its feet, but the general consensus is that what’s coming out of Cambridge and 128 is, well, behind the curve. All the really bleeding edge stuff is happening in the Bay Area and Seattle. Cambridge is viewed as so...academic. You know what they say about academic code. If you could do it, I would say move Deus Ex Machina out to Mountain View or Redwood City---to get some more credibility. At least put some business people there."
"Thanks for the tip," said Jonathan, lamely. "We’ll talk about this." He logged off. "So, folks, you want to go ahead and change our image? Like maybe hold bake sales or blood drives or something?"
"No blood drives," said Catfood. "I wouldn’t want to get a vampire like Drexler too close to that much plasma."
"Wait, wait, we’re getting too nonlinear here," complained Sascha. "These issues have no bearing on the technology itself, and it’s making me confused. So the topics we’re looking at right now are: size, publicity, outside funding, corporate image. Somebody help me here."
"We-ell, you do need to clean up," said Will. "It would make it a lot easier for me to do my job."
"I don’t know what you’ve been used to in Bland-Land," said Jonathan. "But here you represent our product, not our haircuts. Why don’t you keep it at that?"
Everyone was quiet. I spoke for the first time. "What about finding a magazine to do some positive coverage on Deus Ex? You could lure a reporter down here and let that person see you guys hard at work refining your superior product and generally not acting very counterculture. I think it would go over great. You wouldn’t even need to call it damage control."
Sascha squeezed my arm. "Actually," he said excitedly, "there’s a reporter for Technology Today who keeps on bugging us for a profile. He’s based in San Francisco---maybe we should get him to cover us at the MultiMediaWorld trade show in January when we’re there. And maybe I’ll even let him come visit Casa Deus."
"We’ll vacuum first, though," I said. Nobody laughed. Everybody looked offended.
Frick gave me a nasty look. She probably didn’t like me talking; I was sure that she didn’t like the idea of having someone from the press---someone from the humanities---poking inanely around her office and accidentally pushing the Delete key on her keyboard. "I have to get to work," she griped. "Can we vote and get it over with?"
"What are we voting on again?" Sascha asked. "I got lost in the bandwidth static storm."
Ian folded his arms. "On whether we’re going to continue to beg for outside funding or hunker down and fund our expansion out of sales. We have zero debt. I’m willing to go without salary for a month instead of taking outside funding and destroying our culture."
Frick glanced at everyone. "Well, I think we should aggressively take the first deal that comes around for $3 million. Let’s walk out of this if we have to. Let the newbies take over."
"Fine," said Sascha. "Who supports doing it immediately?" Frick and Catfood raised their hands. Sascha slowly raised his own. "And who’s against it?" Jonathan, Ian, and Drexler raised theirs.
"Deadlocked! Come on! We’re running out of time," Sascha said. "I don’t mean just in terms of this meeting. I have this...I guess you’ll have it to call it a sixth sense...and all it’s telling me is ‘You don’t have much time left,’ whatever that means in our case."
"Clearly, we’re not going to come to a consensus today," said Ian, grabbing his stuff. "I’ve got a buttload of work to do. I can’t be dicking around with these trivial arguments."
"No," replied Sascha harshly. "You’re wrong. We do need to finish. We definitely need to hire more people for marketing and tech support when 3.0 goes into full release. Right now we don’t have the $100,000 per person we need to support them for our next six-month sales cycle. We need the money to hire them, one way or the other. So you folks who don’t want to get more outside funding think of a way we can raise the money without it."
"If anyone is interested in taking a detailed look at our cash flow, talk to me," said Wendy. "I’ll give you something to think about. We’ve got less coming in than anyone imagines."
Sascha snapped his laptop shut. "We’re already behind this morning. Let’s get to work and talk about this again next week. But I don’t want this kind of noise-to-signal ratio again. Class dismissed."
But he sat in the conference room after everyone else had left, begging me to stay with him. He rocked precariously back and forth on the back two legs of his chair, his feet still on the desktop, rubbing a crystal he had taken out of his pocket.
"So, you wanna take on some responsibility here?" he asked. "Be part of the group?"
"Are you just asking me to join up because of the finances? How bad are things really?"
Sascha lowered his voice. "Things are bad. You heard what Wendy said? We’ve got about six months of cash left before we have to start living off our credit cards again. We haven’t done that in years."
I definitely wasn’t feeling very honeymoon-y anymore. "You want me to do this PR stuff?"
"Evidently, we don’t do a very good job of it on our own. Somehow we lack the foresight to pick good people. Will is a big sucko. We go through marketing people like candy. But you’re so pretty. You’re so interactive with the people outside our community. You’d do a great job. Let me get you the phone number and email address of this reporter at Technology Today. His name is Peter something or other. He’s supposed to do crack puff pieces." Sascha laughed. "If that’s not a contradiction in terms."
"Are you sure I’ll be any good at this? And what about stuff like nepotism? Aren’t people going to dislike me more than they already do?"
"Nah. Nobody dislikes you. It’ll be good for your self-esteem."
"You think I have problems with my self-esteem, Mr. Swollen Head?"
Sascha had opened up his laptop again and was rooting around in it, avoiding eye contact. "OK. Pretend I didn’t say that. But take me seriously on this: The best way for you to get integrated into this group is to be part of the Deus Ex Machina team. You have skills the rest of us don’t. And people will appreciate you more if you use them. Here. I have this Peter guy’s info in my database. I’m going to email it to you."
He turned to me, much more serious this time. "Sara, I know you’re still a little whacked out by how much your life has changed recently. I resonate with you on that. But I need you. Deus Ex needs you. I’ve said it before. I’m really scared. We’re coasting right now, but look at all these companies that were doing so well just a little while ago. They’re being swallowed alive or just plain starving to death. ‘For the hackers, by the hackers,’ is just not a happening thing anymore. There may be a time when all we have left is each other. So there better be as many ‘each others’ as possible. Understand?"
"Sure," I said uncomfortably, and not quite understanding.
Sascha kissed the top of my head. "My wife! My wife! My life! After all this time, I’m actually married!" He danced around the table a little. His mood swings were awfully disconcerting. "Anyway, call the reporter," he said, as he danced backwards out of the room. "I think he’s going to make a big difference in what happens to us."
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