After many hungry years, at last it was the day of the Grand Reopening of Mary Chung’s Chinese Eatery. There was even a newsgroup on the Net about it. The ceremonial Opening Night was an excuse for a giant reunion of all those Techies who hadn’t seen each other since the 1980s.
Everybody, including many everybodies I hadn’t seen or even heard of, was there that evening. The line to eat snaked out the door, onto the unseasonably cold, rainy sidewalk. Sascha brushed past them and stalked in. He was convinced that if people hadn’t been talking about him and Deus Ex beforehand, they would certainly start now. Sure enough, the cortege of bearded potbellied hackers and their noodly girlfriends started whispering among themselves the minute they saw us.
I actually heard someone whisper, "Oooh, it’s Sascha Strathmore..." like they were awed or something. But mostly the restaurant reverberated with MIT alums stuffing themselves and talking business and laughing loudly.
Sascha looked vaguely at all of them, dazzled by his own notoriety.
The line to eat was going on an hour. But being a Figure also has its advantages: We were almost immediately invited to eat with three tables, and extra chairs were brought for us. Maybe they were only doing it so they could hear the dirt first.
We found ourselves with six other people, packed at a table meant for four, with Szechuan eggplant and pork dumplings shoved in our faces.
"How’s business?" asked Troll, with a sad all-knowing smile.
Marie sat on the other side of me. Her smile at me was even sadder. I had never called her back after our one discussion, even though Sascha and Troll talked often on the phone or by email. She held a little bowl of bean sprouts close to her face so that only her pale eyes and her bony cheekbones showed.
"I’m leaving him," she whispered. "I can’t tolerate taking care of him anymore."
"Oh," I whispered back lamely. "I’m sorry."
"Not as sorry as I am."
"Does he know yet?"
"Yes he knows. This is the first time he’s been out of bed in a week. Hasn’t Sascha told you?"
"No. Sascha and I don’t talk much these days."
"You know about the business as well as I do," Sascha was saying to Troll. "But all these animals out there---" he swung his arm out at the rest of the restaurant--- "are waiting to get fed. I’ve gotta do some damage control."
He got up and, holding a bowl of Dun-Dun noodles in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other, delicately picked his way through the mounds of wet backpacks, umbrellas and windbreakers---an atmosphere, I imagined, unpleasantly reminiscent of an MIT cafeteria. He stopped at almost every table, talking affably and intimately to people I was fairly sure either hated him or just wanted to hear the bad news from the Man himself.
Sascha reminded me of one of those political candidates who are about to drop out of the race but kiss the babies for one more night, just in case. He leaned over people’s shoulders, dropped to his knees to engage in deeper conversation, fed people from his bowl. I saw myself being pointed out. Frick, Drexler, and Shanna squeezed in at the table with us, making nine at a table for four. Thank God Sascha and I weren’t the only Deus Exers here now, although I dreaded having to make conversation with Frick as she stonily stuffed wonton into her mouth. Luckily, I didn’t have to; she pulled a copy of a Joanna Russ SF book out of her backpack and held it close to her face.
The Deus Ex Machina PR machine, which included me, had actually done a better job than I had expected at squelching the nastier speculations about the company. Rumors, of course, were still being manufactured and passed on like crazy---it was impossible to keep certain things quiet in a community like this---but both the trade and mainstream press had thus far been held at bay. Let all those former Lotus employees snicker about another Cambridge company being squeezed dry by Big Blue. They didn’t know about all our shameful financial records being hacked; they couldn’t have heard about the debacle with DeutschMedia. And luckily the Boston Globe’s technology reporting was so lame and unoriginal that it would be weeks before anyone there figured out there was a problem. Unless the editors were "tipped off," of course.
Then I saw Peter Greer walk in, resplendent with tousled hair and a big umbrella, and I knew that something was really wrong. Including with me. My heart went ba-BOOM ba-BOOM at the sight of him, and the unpleasant thrill I felt along with it was not just apprehension, but flat-out desire.
Frick looked up from her book to stare at Peter as well. Her thin little lips pinched up tighter than ever. He glanced at her. She looked down. She furtively brought her eyes upward. He looked back decisively in her direction. She slammed her book shut on the tablecloth and stalked towards the Ladies’ Room.
No one but me had witnessed this pantomime. Peter leaned on the handle of his big striped umbrella, watching her departure with a little amused smile. He was definitely moving in for the kill on her.
I got up and met Peter at the front door. "Hi," I said. "Did you come here to join the party?"
"Oh, I heard that Mary Chung was reopening her restaurant to celebrate her birthday. Seemed like the place to be. Don’t worry. I’m not doing any overt research tonight. Just the regular covert stuff." He took off his raincoat. He was wearing flat-front khakis with boxer shorts underneath them, I could tell. I could also tell that he found me infinitely cute and desirable. Why is a girl like this married to all these technofreaks, I imagined him thinking.
"Do you want to sit down with us?" I asked stiffly. "You can sit at Sascha’s seat while he’s up." My invitation clearly would not be received well at our table.
"Sure, I’d love to." Damn, I thought. He’s got me exactly where he wants.
I saw Frick peek out of the bathroom door. Only when she saw that I had Peter engaged on the other side of the restaurant, did she approach the table. Like a shy but greedy cat, she dashed to her place, wordlessly snapped up her book and backpack, and darted off again. Drexler shrugged fatalistically and ate her remaining wontons. I didn’t see her for the rest of the night.
The conversation slowed to a rusty trickle after Peter, smiling, sat down. Drexler said, "How’re you doing man," in a dead tone. Troll smiled at him in an old, old way and shook his hand. "Pleased to meet you," he said. "I hear you work for Technology Today. Great magazine. They’ve really captured a big market share for being so new."
Peter smiled graciously. "Thanks. I know you’re Alan Weiss, and I’ve heard about your story. I’m on your side."
Sascha, still flirting en masse in the middle of the room, seemed oblivious to the fact that someone had taken his seat and was scrunched up cozily next to his wife.
Peter passed me a card underneath the table. "Here," he said in a low voice. "This is my other email address."
The card was from Rolling Stone Magazine. It said: "Peter Greer, Contributing Writer."
"This is who I really work for. I mean, I write for TT, but the hard-core tech stuff was never really my forte. I’d think your husband would be happy to have a major feature done about him in Rolling Stone. I would imagine it’s more up your alley, anyway."
My discomfort with this particular Techie scene, even though it had been lessening in real time for a few months now, still must have been obvious to anyone who halfway knew the subtleties of human behavior. I was startled by Peter’s perceptiveness only because I hadn’t been around those kinds of people in a while.
"Let me get this straight," I whispered back. "The TT thing is a cover. You’re actually going to write us up in Rolling Stone but you’re afraid to tell us. Is that it?"
"Imagine," said Peter, spreading his hands out. "Getting these folks on the cover of RS. Annie Leibovitz does the photography. ‘Death of a Startup: The High Times and Hard Fall of Deus Ex Machina Software.’"
Fuck, fuck, fuck, I thought. He’s on to us. And I can’t even say anything to him to blow him off because he’ll know I’m trying to mislead him.
"I can’t believe you," I snarled. "You’re so dishonest. You---piece of...cruft," I ended lamely.
"Ooh, hacker lingo," Peter said benignly. "Sara, your voice and vocabulary are beautiful. Why not use the King’s English?"
"Why in God’s name didn’t you tell us the truth? Why didn’t you tell me, at least? What does Rolling Stone care about us for anyway?"
"These," said Peter, with as grand a gesture of his long sweatered arm as he could muster under the crowded conditions, "are the people who control the underpinnings of the modern world. Or at least they did control them. Isn’t this something the reading public should be informed about?"
"Jesus Christ." I dropped my head in my hands as a great off-key roar grew around me.
After all, it was Mary Chung’s birthday. All those guys from MIT who had never learned to cook and ate at her restaurant almost every day during the 1980s were so insanely grateful and nostalgic to see her back that they were calling on the whole clientele---who by and large were delighted volunteers---to sing "Happy Birthday" to her. And there was Sascha, maker of mean mousse and sublime pesto, a set of twenty Calphalon pots hanging in his renovated kitchen, who was not only not responsible for creating this party but also was not invited to it, singing louder than everyone and dropping to one knee to offer Mary his empty bowl of Dun-Dun noodles. Peter’s DAT audio tape slid out of his pocket. Click-click, click-click, it went, and I was sure that his eyes were taking high-fidelity recordings as well.
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