Sales of ExCom 3.0 hadn’t been going well despite our notorious presence at the trade show. We heard all kinds of excuses: too expensive, too Unix-oriented, more gadgetry than most companies needed. Or they were waiting for the now far-too-well-publicized 3.1.
So it was a major coup when, after hours of phone negotiations, Sascha, Jonathan, and the marketing team were able to swing a deal with a major German distributor, DeutschMedia. DeutschMedia would be Deus Ex’s European point company, selling ExCom to all of its customers---and it would buy a lot of units for its own employees as well.
Things were looking much better. We went out for a big dinner that night.
Around 3:00 a.m., I heard Sascha climb up the ladder to bed. He jingled like a harem.
"Hi beautiful," he whispered. "Come worship the goddess of love with me."
"Mppphlmm," I said, opening one eye. The moon was full. Sascha was wearing a black silk kimono and smelled like he had been sitting in a closed room filled with piñon nut incense. "Why now?"
He climbed on top of me, with the blankets between us. "I want to celebrate. I was getting panicky for a while, but I feel that things are really working out." He licked the hollow in my neck.
"Jesus, Sascha, what are you on?"
He looked miffed. "Nothing! OK, maybe a couple caps of L-Tryptophan and a swish of hydrogen peroxide. But nothing serious. It’s a beautiful night! Everything’s right in the world, and we are one with the universe. Let me under the covers. It’s cold."
I grudgingly let him under the duvet.
"I never get to spend enough time with my wife. Sometimes I’m afraid she’s going to leave me when I’m not watching."
I didn’t refute him. But he was so ingratiating, so cuddly and sweet-smelling, that it was hard to be annoyed at him. He nibbled and tickled me. I put his strong, hard hands where I wanted him to touch me. He complied. Then the bedside phone rang.
"Don’t answer it," I begged. "If it’s important, they’ll call back in the morning."
The phone rang again. "No, I have to. Someone might need me. Someone might have died. The Broadway offices might have been broken into." He grabbed the receiver. "Hul-lo?" he said in a whiny fatigued voice.
He suddenly stiffened, and the blond hairs on his leg, which was intertwined with mine, prickled. "Yes, yes, good morning. How are you?" he asked, professional and poised.
"Who is it?" I mouthed. Sascha waved me away with his hand, frowning.
"How can I help you, sir? What’s the problem?...Yes, I’m glad we were able to speak with your company over the phone yesterday...Yes, I’m glad you respect the quality of our product...But you’ve talked to your president and he says there’s not enough funding for the purchase right now?...You did fax us your purchase order yesterday, after all---we have it in hand...Thank you for realizing it’s 3 a.m. our time...Yes, this is my home phone...I know you’re disappointed by this...Do you anticipate you’ll be receiving funding any time in the near future? ...I see...Well, I’ll talk to my people in the morning and see what we can do about getting your company a special discount, since it seemed very important for you to be the first European distributor...Thank you sir. Güten tag."
Sascha slammed down the phone. "Oh FUCK!" he howled. He curled up on the bed with his hands clutched in his hair. "I’m such a fucking FAILURE!"
I touched his shoulder, but he shook my hand away. "What happened?"
He didn’t answer at first. "That was a representative from DeutschMedia. The company that twelve hours ago was about to buy 200 shrinkwrapped copies of ExCom plus the EC distribution rights. What the fuck happened? Why wasn’t I paying attention?"
"Didn’t they just say that they had less money than they thought? Why are you taking it so personally?"
"You don’t understand," he growled. "These German companies are so back-asswards. If they say they ran out of funding, it means that they found something wrong with the product and don’t want to tell you. If they run out of money, they claim that they found some bugs and have you run around trying to debug nonexistent problems until they come up with the cash.
"But this is really serious. They know it’s in the middle of the night here. They don’t call up the president of a company and harass him in the middle of the night unless there is something so drastically wrong that their politeness can’t contain it. FUCK!" Sascha made a fist and was about to drive it into the wall, but contained himself just in time.
"I’m not going to be able to sleep now anyway," he said tonelessly. "I’m going to put a message out on the broadcast system. Anyone who’s online is going to be over here in half an hour. The rest will be personally called at five. You go back to sleep. I’m going downstairs to look at the source code and everything else." He stomped down the ladder, taking a swipe at some things on the bedroom shelves so that they clattered to the floor. He slammed the door behind him, but I heard him wreak minor havoc all the down to the second floor: stomp, stomp, slam, crash; stomp, stomp, slam, crash.
*
Despite my intent to sleep as late as I could and avoid the crisis, I was awake by 6:30, aware of the bad vibes wafting upstairs from the demo room. I decided this might not be the best morning to sneak off for a sunrise swim, although it would have calmed me down a lot.
Even though I could only see their backs, the assembled crowd looked pretty grim. Sascha was sitting at one of the computers, with Jonathan, Frick, Ian, and Drexler crowded around him.
"Whoever did this, I will have his head and his ass and his balls," Jonathan said calmly.
"You and I both know who did it," said Sascha. "I can’t believe that people would take their little vendettas against me and turn it into this kind of unconscionable sabotage. This isn’t an undergrad hack. This is a deliberate attempt to destroy my professional reputation and the reputation of my company. I will not stand for this."
"Hi guys," I said, slipping in and joining them. "Is this a bad time to explain to me what happened?"
Sascha didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at me. Remember what you said last night about your wife leaving while you weren’t looking, I thought, irritated.
"Toby and Crete---the guys who’ve been doing the quality checks on our beta---apparently hacked a back door into ExCom 3.0," said Jonathan. "I guess they did it so they could spy on Sascha without his knowing it. Or maybe they did it just for fun. They programmed the back door so that they could do real-time recordings and upload those recordings to everyone else on the network. And all this stuff is supposed to be cryptographically protected. It’s as neat a hack as if we had planned it ourselves."
Jonathan walked over to another workstation. "Let me show you what’s up. Right now, Sascha’s file sharing is turned off. But look at this." He typed some commands. A still of Sascha’s brooding, sleepless face filled the screen. "This is trivial. It’s just a couple of basic communications commands with some jazzy stuff thrown in. I’m worried that our guys told the Germans about this. I don’t think even the best hackers would find an Easter egg like this so quickly."
Jonathan turned on the internal Connectix camera. "Speak, sir."
Sascha smiled grimly out of the monitor. "I demand satisfaction," he said.
"Now, let’s upload this file." said Jonathan, unperturbed. He hit a few more commands and the film clip appeared on a third machine. "See? This could get really crazy if you wanted it to. We don’t know exactly how DeutschMedia found out about it, though. We’ve got Catfood on the line to Hamburg, social engineering some uncharacteristically loose lips over there. We won’t know the whole story until he gets off the phone."
It was a tense time. Sascha, still wearing his kimono and his silly jingly chains, asked me to get his razor. Frick squeamishly massaged the back of Drexler’s neck, as Drexler let out inappropriate squeaks of pleasure. "Can I go to the coffeehouse and get you guys espresso, or sticky buns, or anything?" I asked hopefully.
"We have fine Kona beans in the freezer," said Sascha. "I’m not in the mood to be spending three dollars on a goddamn cup of coffee right now. Anyway, you’re not our assistant. We pay Ariadne good money for that."
"You pay Ariadne good money because your friend Crystal begged you to give her a job," I said quietly.
"Sara, I’d love a cup of coffee and a lemon bar," murmured Drexler, always helpful. "And get some Meow Mix for Catfood, just in case. He might need refreshments when he finally gets off the phone with the Germans."
I never got to escape to the bakery, though, because Catfood rushed into the demo room like a character in a sitcom. "Oh my God," he panted. "Guess what I’ve found out. Give me one of my cigarettes---I’m going to smoke it in here."
Sascha got out of his big chair and motioned for Catfood to sit down. "Can’t," panted Catfood, lighting up with trembling hands. "Too wired. Got some kitty treats?"
Sascha bit his nails. "So how bad is it?"
"Bad," said Catfood, between drags. "I was actually talking to the hacker himself. Which is why he divulged---he was so proud of himself for being a spy. Plus, his English was good, too.
"I said I was an American college student interning in Germany to study European computer marketing. In fact, I said, I was working for a company that’s supposed to get ExCom from DeutschMedia. I pretended to be really excited about taking a look at the product---you know, snagging some source code big time. I hinted around that I was quite the little hacker, but in a way that if he wasn’t a hacker himself he wouldn’t take the bait. But he was. He was really fired up to tell me about how an anonymous source had tipped them off about the back door in ExCom and how outraged---that was the word he used---the president of the company was about it.
"Why was he outraged? Because yesterday evening, after DeutschMedia had sent us the purchase order, the president was having a sexually explicit videoconference with his mistress. Just in time to test the effectiveness of the product, you gotta think! So Mr. Über-Hacker, who probably has been doing a little spying on his boss beforehand, records and uploads the whole compressed clip to his coworkers. They get it at 8 a.m. today their time---and voilà, Sascha’s middle-of-the-night phone call.
"Goes to show, you can never be too careful," Catfood concluded, reaching for another cigarette. "And you can’t trust anyone."
It was pretty quiet for a bit. "Summary execution?" suggested Jonathan.
"‘You can never be too careful,’" repeated Sascha wearily. "I guess you can’t.
"First, we have to stop distribution of 3.0, right away," he said. "We have to make sure that marketing holds off all their negotiations until we give the word. We have to send out an emergency patch to everyone who already has it. All the shrink-wraps we’ve made already have to be destroyed. We’ve got to tell Will what’s happened in a way that won’t freak him out. I don’t trust him with the full story. I don’t know how this is going to affect our business. It’s just going to be really, really bad.
"I don’t know how I let this happen. I don’t know why I thought these guys were safe to trust."
I felt curiously numb, although bad for those involved, who, I guess, included me. I glanced around the room. Sascha looked stricken and angry. Ian began doing some tension-relieving yoga moves. Jonathan stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. Catfood, tension finally released, slumped down in the nearest chair and reached for the catfood-filled Baggie in his jacket pocket. Drexler huddled in his seat. Frick was impenetrable as usual, looking around at everyone inscrutably and a little contemptuously, as if for falling prey to human emotions.
"Let me take a shower and we’ll get to work," said Sascha, getting up from his chair without bothering to check if his robe were covering him properly. It wasn’t. Nobody seemed to notice. "We have a bitch of a day ahead of us."
*
I was not there, of course, to witness the "summary execution," nor would I have chosen to see it. Apparently, Toby and Crete, the part-time QC accusees, claimed innocence through the very minute they were stripped of their email addresses, passwords, keys, and escorted out the doors. Sascha was sure of their guilt, and it seemed that he had convinced everyone else of it as well.
As I say, I didn’t observe the tribunal, but somehow I believed Toby and Crete when they said that they had better ways to spend their time than fucking up someone else’s product, particularly when they were in such close contact with other people from the company. Sascha said they were such lousy hackers they didn’t even have the guts to tell the truth about their mischief. But I felt differently. I had a scary intuition about what had actually happened, but I was sure that no one would believe me, so I kept it to myself. In retrospect, I should have talked sooner and saved all of us a lot of grief.
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