All the T3 connections in the world won’t do you any good if you have to close down the place you’re connected to. Shortly after Sascha’s adventure on the Cambridge high wires, he found it necessary, with great sorrow and misgiving, to close the Deus Ex Machina "show" offices on Broadway.
Sascha found takers for the space right away: two guys running a pay-as-you-go Web storage site. WebPorium designed home pages for businesses at $75/hour, presented them as a virtual mall with lots of glitzy interactive graphics, and charged big bucks per megabyte stored on the server.
The guys who ran WebPorium were nearly rich. They were grungy hackers who smoked a lot and showered seldom, and made a showy point of dragging their stained futons out of a battered Nissan Sentra and up the stairs to our vacated offices. They were so busy they couldn’t bother sleeping at home. And in any case, home was going to change soon; they both had condos under agreement, purchased with cash.
"They don’t need to shower," Sascha said bleakly. "They’re bathing in their own stock options." I imagined them in some kind of silent movie schtick, lying together in a bathtub with shower caps and scrub brushes, while dollar bills overflowed from the tub and ran onto the floor.
Sascha was generally pretty bleak these days, and he had a right to be. Deus Ex Machina’s business strategy---selling a few high-priced systems at a time---was failing, and dragging the company right down with it. People didn’t trust us anymore. So what if ExCom was a lovely product? They told us so over and over, and they still didn’t want it. Maybe, if we were really, really good, our potential customers would buy the NT version when it came out. But we couldn’t even develop ExCom 3.1 without more funding---funding that was supposed to come from the sales of 3.0.
And we were again without a marketing person. Will and Sascha had finally had enough of one another. With the closing of the Broadway offices, Will’s domain, he had bailed and fled back to the ample bosom of Microsoft, which rehired him pronto, no questions asked.
Worse than this snub was what I was privately calling "Tanya’s Revenge," and presumably the shame of it hung heavy over my head. Tanya had, of course, purchased 75 seats of ExCom for her Hollywood company while under the influence. She had been sent up to San Francisco to do this, and she had even gotten the enviable discount reserved for our "preferred customers." But somehow her superiors had found out just how exactly that discount had been procured. Suddenly her boss had become a stern moralist, refusing to do business with a firm that threw decadent sloshed-out parties in over-expensive hotels and drugged and seduced their potential customers in order to make a sale.
At least that’s the side of the story he got. "Sascha, Jonathan," he said sternly (he was calling from L.A., so they were all on a first-name basis, even under the circumstances), "we’ve talked it over, and we just don’t think that we can purchase your product in good conscience. IBM’s groupware isn’t as sophisticated as yours, and their tech support line is always clogged. But it is a lot cheaper. And frankly, we don’t see a lot of stability behind your people. We heard about what happened at the Fairmont in Frisco. This is not 1976, or even 1986. You own a software company, not Studio 54. I hope you don’t treat all your customers this way."
This was a low blow. And a false one, but the customer is always right, even though Sascha never stopped cursing them for being stupid technical ignoramuses who would let someone like Tanya pull the kind of stunt she had.
I was not being a great helpmate in this situation, either. I had become such a swimming addict that they should have set up a poolside 12-step meeting just for me. Under that cool, amniotic water I could be myself and my body as one, free of distractions, my husband’s disagreeable temper tantrums, and the unpleasant knowledge that the Deus Exers were no longer "them," but "us."
My hair was turning green and crispy, something that hadn’t happened to me in years. All the mega-conditioner I glopped on it only made it look worse. I felt like I had permanent bath wrinkles on my fingers, and perpetually bloodshot eyes from trying to see something I couldn’t through all the chlorine jets. I monopolized the Senior Swim, and the other side of the pool during morning hydrotherapy for disabled Cantabrigians. I was so desperate I even volunteered to lifeguard during after-school Elementary Hour. Once I had to pull out two little boys who were trying to drown each other. Turns out they were escapees from the nearby school for gifted children, who had run over to the Y to fight to the death over some imagined insult.
The patient townie staff at the Y knew me by name, and I, them. Lifelong cultural elitist that I was, I felt safe and protected amongst their heavy Boston accents. I talked sincerely about the weather with the security guard. I sat in the echoing wood-paneled halls with the woman who washed the towels, commiserating about the perpetual corruption of the Cambridge City Council, whose offices loomed just across the street in City Hall. Except for the large hackerish woman I sometimes saw in the locker room, who always greeted me politely, and lately sympathetically (I never knew her name; I just called her "Gaia" in my head to amuse myself), I was merely another member who paid her dues on time and did some volunteer work.
At the Y, nobody ever ran up to me with wild excitement, shouting things like, "Did you see what Netscape’s stock did today?!", or, "How about that hack on Sprint’s TCP/IP backbone?" But when I got out of my bathing suit and dried my hair naked in front of the locker room’s big mirror (seeing my body without shame was still new to me) I knew that with every passing, frantic day I was becoming less and less who I had been and mutating into the woman Sascha Strathmore had wanted to marry. And believe me, I certainly wasn’t doing it to make him happy.
Sascha, meanwhile, was suffering the torment of the dammed. No one else, including me---especially not me, it seemed---was welcome to participate in his one-hacker orgy of corporate second-guessing and dire predictions. The man with no secrets had fallen silent, except for a few high-pitched whimpers about coffee not having as much caffeine as it used to, and about the summer’s sudden, enervating humidity.
Never the most sexual of people, Sascha had fallen into a kind of default celibacy. Strung out on various kinds of legal and quasi-legal uppers during the day, he was a wide-eyed wreck at night with no interest in any kind of physical intimacy. It had been weeks since he had rolled off me with his drooly, open-mouthed post-coital snore. Instead, he spent his nights with laptop in hand, pacing through the house, up and down the creaky stairs, in a Gap shirt and his girly bikini briefs. He muttered to himself about "exit strategies" and "Windows NT," and paused and moaned on the steps like a forlorn ghost. And I, never the most sexual of people either, was starting to miss him and his abrupt, desperate touch.
All these circumstances were leading me to think more and more about Peter Greer. Peter, like most of the men I had met in the last year, made no attempt to disguise his attraction to me, and the attraction was getting stronger---and mutual. But unlike the other guys, who found me a welcome distraction from the wide-anchored, dry-humored women in their boys’ club, Peter Greer had plenty of blond, pearl-and-cashmere coeds to choose from in Boston. His thing about me was actually about me.
I had some speculative information I wanted to give to Peter Greer, but I was afraid to. Don’t get me wrong. Deus Ex Machina Software was still master of its own disaster. But I don’t think that any DEM employees, with the exception of Drexler, who wanted to remain in Xanadu regardless of the long-term cost, had ever considered that one of their own might be hastening the company’s decline.
So I went through my own indecisive hell for a couple of weeks. Peter was certainly there to be told; he had come to Cambridge to document a successful company in a declining industry, and now, quite by accident, he had a much better story on his hands. He hung around a lot now, and he hadn’t told me he’d be leaving any time soon. If I told him what I feared and it turned out to be true, his story would be so hot that a happy-talk magazine like Technology Today probably wouldn’t take it. So I swam, fretted, made some perky damage-control PR calls for the company, fretted, lay up at night looking through the glass circle at the stars, and fretted.
One morning at around 8:00, I woke to find my husband drowsing stiff and cold on the other side of the bed. He wasn’t near enough to touch, and his arms were curled desperately around his laptop, whose little green "sleep" light blinked at me impassively. I reached over and poked him. He opened his eyes and looked at me without any particular familiarity. Then he got up wordlessly and staggered downstairs to his office. When I couldn’t hear him anymore, I called Peter’s Harvard Square apartment.
"This is Sara," I said. It was the first time I had ever called his place in Cambridge. "I need to talk to you---and not at Casa Deus, either. Can we meet somewhere in the Square this morning? There’s some stuff I want to run by you."
As when I had called him the first time, Peter had been asleep, but he was clearly excited by the prospect of getting me alone for any reason. "When? Where? You name it."
"How about the new tea bar, in an hour? What I want to talk to you about is kind of difficult. So please be patient and everything."
"Sure. Whatever you want." I heard him scrabbling in some papers. "Should I bring my tape recorder? Or is this personal?"
Poor Peter was poised to hear some mad declaration from me. I think it’s only in fiction or in movie-star lives that people have affairs their first year of marriage, though. Enough of the prude still remained in me that even if Mr. Greer decided to lean over the little tea table and clasp my hand with his practiced emotional delicacy, he would be smacked. I was a married woman, after all.
He was waiting for me at a table in the back, underneath a big skylight. His bright hair was bathed in morning sun. Nothing about him was subtle.
"Sara!" he said, standing up and pulling out one of the rickety chairs for me. "Tell me what’s going on."
"How far done are you with your article?"
"I just submitted it this week. My editor wanted a long lead time on it. She thinks it’s a really big story, and she wants it to be perfect."
So the story was already in. I was hugely relieved---my suspicions could be safely reconfined to my own head. I smiled benevolently. "I’m sure you did a great job. I can’t wait to see it."
Peter leaned closer with his obsequious smile. "What did you really come here for? I’ll tell you what I came here for. To see you, alone." His pert freckled nose was centimeters away from mine.
"Have you been watching Cass Frick?" I blurted out.
Peter leaned away and his face pinched up. "Why? Is there some reason she should be watched?"
"I mean, don’t you find something a little underhanded and even...malevolent...about her?"
"I’m surprised to hear you say that, Sara. She’s a woman in a man’s world. She holds her own. The story of how she single-handedly brought down the guy who was harassing her makes great copy. Defending oneself all the time makes one a little rough around the edges, yes?"
I was beginning to think that Peter’s wide-eyedness was an indication that he knew more than he was saying.
"Be straight with me," I insisted. "You’ve been watching all this from the outside. Do you think that Frick might be responsible for at least one of the hacks on the company?"
"That’s a big accusation to make. Which hack, for instance?"
"Oh, like screwing stuff up at the trade show. I think she was deliberately dressed up that day so that she wouldn’t draw attention to herself and could sneak around better. Or calling the cops while we were holding the rave---she wasn’t there with us. FTP’ing our financial records to the CIA. Knowing about the back door in ExCom and telling the hacker in Germany about it. Or even doing the work herself." I took a big slug of my tea, waiting for the caffeine to kick in. Next time, I would remember to bring along my own ephedra leaves.
"Well," said Peter, bewildered. "Stop the presses, or something. Do you have any evidence that’s more than circumstantial?"
"None, really. Just an idea. You’re the investigative reporter around here. Help me out."
"What if I do some research and find out that your hunch is real? Would you want me to print it? Won’t that kind of exposure automatically mean the end of the company? Or perhaps your marriage to Mr. Strathmore? Come to think of it, that actually wouldn’t be so bad. You are definitely not happy. Neither am I."
"You want to include my tip in your article? In case you haven’t figured it out yet, my people don’t trust you. But they’ll talk if you massage them right. Just keep my name out of it."
Oh, the treachery of it. "My people"---how that phrase just rolled off the tongue of someone who prided herself on never having had any community to fall back on. Now I was personally sending my people down the royal road to ruin, and I wasn’t even brave enough to identify myself as the Judas.
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