The weather had been cold and rainy for almost a week now, and my real-time feed to the outside world via MIT’s Building 54 showed me nothing but a gray film. And I was so very tired, achingly, arthritically tired---while at the same time I had methamphetamine-like jitters. Tired and wired, my little joke went; then it went nowhere because I had no one to share it with.
I sort of remember leaning my head back against the padded headrest of my black ergonomic office chair, listening to the hum of machines outside my office. No one’s even around to work, I thought. How depressing. I’m totally depressed, I think.
Then the Angel of Death was in my narrow little doorway, harsh, noble face, cataract of hair, and beckoning arm pointing me towards my doom. Actually, it was Jonathan, with dripping hair and a sodden white fisherman’s sweater. "We need you," he said. "Come outside and talk to us."
Jonathan led me into Sascha’s office. Everyone except Frick was there. Sascha sat in his big chair, cleaning out his fingernails with his Swiss army knife. He was looking down. I noticed, eyeing the top of his pale head, the beginnings of a bald spot. I decided I wouldn’t tell him, ever.
"Why didn’t you tell me?" he asked in a tiny voice, without looking up. "Why didn’t you tell someone? I feel so...betrayed...by you or something. Like you and Peter Greer were in this together. Doing your own little subversive thing, without us. Without me."
"I...I wasn’t sure," I said stupidly. "I didn’t want to tell you something I couldn’t confirm was true. What’s happened? Where is she?"
"She called in sick," said Jonathan. "She’s working at home, but I videoconferenced with her a little and now she’s coming over."
"I understand that it’s her ideology do things this way," continued Sascha. "But I fired people for her tricks. Two perfectly innocent people. No one stopped me! Sara---you’re so fucking passive! Oh no, you don’t want to rock any boats, oh no you don’t belong in this group so you don’t say anything. Where’s your initiative? No wonder you didn’t go to a decent fucking college---"
He broke off. "Someone’s knocking."
Frick stood in the doorway. Her hair and glasses were wet, and she wore a giant army surplus poncho over all her clothes, including her backpack.
"Hello," she said brusquely, surveying the room. I made myself not turn away. "Frightful weather we’re having, isn’t it? May I sit down?"
Jonathan rose from his seat and gestured to her. "Please."
Frick pulled off her poncho and dropped it in a corner. She sat wetly in Jonathan’s chair.
Nobody spoke at first.
"So," said Sascha, finally. He pulled his wedding ring off his left hand and put it back on again; he did the same with the brass rat on his right. "Very neat hack. Couldn’t have done it better myself."
"Thank you," said Frick, taking off her glasses and polishing them.
"You realize you’re fired, effective immediately."
"I understand that. Better to lose my job with a bang than with a whimper, I suppose."
"We’d also like it if you gave back your voting stock."
"Cheerio. It will be lovely for you to have more paper to remember the company by."
I found myself holding my breath, waiting for Frick’s attitude to spark an explosion in Sascha. None came.
Jonathan stood sadly in front of her. "Frick, we’ve been friends a long time, right? I rode in Godbody, your old Oldsmobile, to my first Philcon SF convention. I wrote the multimedia weather program with you. I just want to know, why’d you do it? I understand---intellectually. But why’d you want to hurt your friends this way?"
"Which hack are you talking about?"
"Which?" said Jonathan. Someone---Catfood or Drexler---moaned faintly in the background. "Whichever one you want to talk about, I guess."
Oh God, here it comes, I thought, feeling implicated.
"Well," Frick said carefully, "there’s the Easter egg in 3.0. Two hundred lines of code. Two hours. That easy." She grinned a little, in spite of herself. "It’s because I used Unix. Small and beautiful. And pure. Lets you finish your job cleanly and get right on to the next hack."
"I don’t want to know how. I want to know why."
"Your security sucks, Sascha. Everybody knows it. You’re too trusting."
"He doesn’t mean that kind of ‘why’, Frick," Jonathan said sharply. "He means the other kind of why, like why you’d want to hurt your friends like this."
"I wasn’t hurting you worse than you guys were hurting yourselves."
"Worse?" burst in Drexler. "You think that that FTP to the CIA wasn’t a direct hit to the cojones? Do you think that sic’ing the MIT police on a bunch of poor fried acidheads who happen to be the principals of Deus Ex Machina Software Inc. isn’t---well, unfair?"
"You take way too much acid, Drexler," said Frick. "Maybe if you weren’t tripping all the time you’d have enough brain cells to monitor your product. In fact, if someone inspected your brain, all they’d find is Windows. Open ones."
"Let me get this straight," interjected Jonathan. "You’ve humiliated and decimated our company---and this is your company too, if I’m not mistaken---in the name of the purity of the Unix operating system. This is what we heard from our buddy at Technology Today, anyway. You pulled a childish stunt like exchanging our pens for IBM’s to make us look like idiots so we wouldn’t go off and join Hitler’s Army---a k a programmers who write for Microsoft Windows? Absolute bullshit, Frick. You know it."
Frick barely shifted in her seat. "You know, things like this wouldn’t happen if you didn’t bring outsiders into the company. First, you get this Microsoft toady to do your marketing for you. See how successful that was? He was probably taking a paycheck from the Borg the whole time he was here. Then you marry Sara, Sascha. See how hacker-savvy she is? And then Sara gets her hands on this Peter Greer character, and I can tell you his techie-friendly optimization. These clowns are our future. Do you want to be around for that, or do you want an excuse to bail out gracefully, while you still have your pride?
"Let me ask you something," she continued, her face setting into a kind of hard sorrow. "Ever spend any time with someone who had cancer? When my mom was at home recovering from her mastectomy, when I was in high school, I was taking care of her. Except everyone knew she wasn’t going to get better...it was really depressing. One day she can get up, and then the next day it hurts too much, one week she barely needs any meds and then suddenly she’s maxed out on the Rx and she’s still in pain...and you try to be all hopeful and wave your dead chicken as hard as you can and the bottom line is that she’s going to be toast anyway...
"So don’t go all psychological on me and say ‘poor old Frick, her mother terminaled on her when she was 16 and now she has to drop Plexiglas signs on the heads of potential customers.’ I just know what a long slow death is like---you all are too into yer damn selves and yer damn Gatesophilia to see that Deus Ex Machina has a big malignancy. So I did you a favor by cutting off a few of your limbs while you weren’t looking. Even if it means talking to a weenie journalist who’s so inelegant I wouldn’t even have wasted eye time on him, back in the Elder Days---"
She shrugged abruptly. "That’s all."
*
Somehow, in some major cosmic way, Frick’s sad and ugly departure became my fault. It was clear: I was a jinx on the company, the Yoko Ono of Deus Ex Machina Software, an evil Luddite force come to sober up Sascha Strathmore and his Merry Pranksters. I sucked. And the only person who sucked more than me, my only ally, was Peter Greer---the muckraking, company-destroying, outright-dissimulating Peter Greer, who had slurped our secrets dry and was printing them for the edification of millions in Rolling Stone.
The RS photographer, the one who did a lot of the magazine’s stark, arty cover shots, had booked the Deus Ex staff for a photo shoot a couple of weeks from now. But at this point staff fractiousness was so great it would be amazing if the five of them could sit in the same room for five minutes without some massive blowups, physical or otherwise.
And I was staying the hell away from those remaining five as much as I could. I could have let my speculations lie. Instead, I had started that awful grapevine, one of my life’s few proactive achievements: Sara to Peter, Peter to Frick, Frick back to Peter and then to Ian and Drexler, Drexler helplessly to Jonathan, Jonathan immediately to Sascha. I had felt guilty about holding in my suspicions; now I felt even worse for speaking.
The presses at Rolling Stone had in fact been stopped to accommodate the new information in Peter’s article. And Peter was a shamelessly grinning yellow journalist whose professional status had just risen because he broke a big story in a big industry; he didn’t care about the people whose lives and livelihoods he had just permanently upset. With the exception of those moments when I thought I might want to run away with Peter Greer, or at least try him out in bed, I was as furious and disgusted as anyone else at Deus Ex Machina Software Inc.
Frick retired to her group house and to her position as keeper of the MIT science fiction library. Perhaps in anticipation of her fate, she had gradually put nearly $250,000 of her Deus Ex salary into a Microsoft-free mutual fund, and planned to live off it for the indefinite future, thanks to her continually frugal lifestyle. On her home turf, she was looked upon with the kind of horrified awe usually reserved for women who kill their husbands in self-defense.
Ian had joined her in his anti- Deus Ex position. He was still doing techie stuff for the company from his house, but was avoiding coming in as much as possible. We knew he hadn’t been privy to Frick’s misdeeds, but he didn’t disagree with them, either. After all, he was a member of Earth First, subscribed to the Unabomber Internet fan club, and looked at corporate sabotage with a kind of aloof amusement.
Adding humiliation to grief, we received a letter from the FBI’s Telecommunications Industry Liaison Unit. Apparently, this department was cracking down on groupware manufacturers. ExCommunicate, we were told, had been violating some kind of federal law by not building provisions for covert surveillance into its product. If found guilty, we could be fined up to $10,000 per day for every day since the product had been on the market. Cal Richmond, our MIT cellular-biologist-turned-corporate lawyer, phoned the FBI agent who had sent us the letter. Richmond told him that ExCommunicate 3.0 was equipped with a back door that permitted this surveillance. In fact, he added deadpan, this feature had already been tried out in the field, with great success.
Ariadne had jumped the DEM ship as quickly as she could. Her excuse was that even though she had changed her name, any press publicity might lead her parents to find her.
I hadn’t seen much of Wendy lately, either. She was on bedrest for the remaining weeks of her pregnancy, and as old-fashioned as it sounded, we were not supposed to discuss the situation at Deus Ex with her, again for stress-related reasons.
Wendy hadn’t exactly requested my company, but I thought it was important to pay her a couple of sympathy calls. I found her confined to lying on her left side, Starchild nagging in a playpen beside her, while she used her laptop computer to send email and play video games.
"I’m getting fat from sitting around all the time," she complained. "And even worse, my midwife says I’m not supposed to do anything that even resembles sex. Remind me to get my tubes tied when I’m done with this one."
Then Drexler had a bit of an overdose scare. Poor old Drex, who had done his best to remain as hearty and decadent as ever during this whole crisis---and had made a point of not taking sides---finally snapped and ingested far too many tabs of acid one day after lunch.
We didn’t know this until it was too late. Sascha, myself, Jonathan, Drexler, Catfood, and the lawyer Richmond, whom we were seeing far too much of lately, huddled together around the big boardroom table in a room that seemed darker and more echoey than usual.
"This reminds me of eating dinner with my parents when I was a kid," commented Sascha. "All that empty space, all those things no one wanted to talk about. We should have a maid to serve us and some candelabra on the table, for that homey touch."
As the meeting began, I glanced over at Drexler. His face was sickly under his wacky hair, and his sharp-nailed hands were dug into the table. But Deus Ex Machina had a strict policy---"no psychedelics at board meetings, no excuses---"so I thought he was stressing out about what Richmond was saying.
"You’re in a tough situation, I’m not going to pretend," the lawyer sighed. "All I’m going to be able to do is to try to prevent some ugly lawsuits and let you get on with your lives without the albatross of Deus Ex Machina hung around your collective necks. All of you who own homes should be able to keep them---everybody but Sascha, that is. This behemoth has got to get on the market."
Sascha, Jonathan, and Catfood dutifully transcribed this grim prognosis on their laptops. I cradled my head in my arms and plunked it on the table.
"Ack," said Drexler, in a weird voice.
"Shut the fuck up, Drex, and take notes," said Sascha. "This is no time to joke around. We need your input."
"Won’t you have just another thin mint?" Drexler shrieked, and toppled off his chair.
Catfood, who had been sitting next to Drexler, jumped up. He looked panicky. "Guys, this is serious. There’s something really wrong with him."
Sascha clambered underneath the table where Drexler was lying. Drexler’s body twitched, and spit rolled out of the corner of his mouth. Sascha carefully opened up each one of his eyes. "Yeah. Looks like a bad trip to me. A really bad one."
I crawled under the table to sit next to Sascha. Sascha bravely stuck his hand in the front pocket of Drexler’s tight jeans, fished around a little, and came out with a plastic container. Inside were two little pieces of paper.
"Just as I thought. I don’t know how many tabs he’s already dropped, though. Let’s see what we can do here. I really don’t feel like taking this circus to a hospital and inviting more publicity."
Sascha sat cross-legged and put Drexler’s head in his lap. With surprising delicacy and gentleness, he stroked Drexler’s cheekbones, pale above the black beard. "Hey Drex, c’mon back," he whispered. "We love you. Everything’s going to be fine. What’s going on in your head?" "Call Shanna," he mouthed to Jonathan. "Get her over here." Then to me, "Get him some water and a couple of vitamin B-12 capsules. They sometimes take the edge off a bad trip."
Sascha continued stroking Drexler’s forehead and talking to him softly. Catfood held him up, and I popped the vitamins into his mouth and rinsed them down with water. He nearly choked, then swallowed as Sascha ran his hands down his neck, as you do when medicating a recalcitrant cat.
About fifteen anxious minutes later, Drexler relaxed a little and his eyes started moving again. "How am I ever going to tell my mother about this?" he asked no one in particular. He was quiet. Then he added, "Is Shanna here? Am I at the Project Athena cluster? I must be. Every orifice in my body wants ramen and Jolt."
Shanna, on her way over, was rerouted via cell phone to the convenience store for packaged noodles and cola. Drexler by this point was mostly passed out, periodically whimpering for his girlfriend and his favorite hacker snacks.
"You schmuck," Shanna said when she finally arrived. "Not once, but twice you have to do this to me." She joined Sascha under the table, while I got up to boil the ramen in the company kitchen.
"Unless this is going to turn into some kind of lawsuit, I’d better leave," said Richmond. "I don’t think you need me billing you for these hours."
After a bit, it became some aberrant kind of game. Drexler would probably be immobilized for the rest of the business day, so we took turns feeding him the ramen, dropping it into his eager mouth like we were feeding worms to a baby bird. Jonathan eventually took off to go home, but not after he had the opportunity to pour half a bottle of Jolt down Drexler’s throat. "That was fun," he said sadistically, and walked out. It was the first time I had ever seen him stressed out enough to abuse another person.
Drexler came to around 5 p.m. Sascha, Catfood, Shanna, and I were gathered around him. The three of them were pounding on their laptops, and I was reading a copy of UnixWorld. The bright leaves brushed the open window, and the late afternoon sun on them and on us was beautiful and sad.
He was clearly still tripping, but lucid. "I was in utero," he said. "It was phat. I was warm and safe, and somehow they fed me hacker chow even though I wasn’t born yet." He took Shanna’s hand. "Were you there? Were you my mother?"
"Drex, I’ve been warning you about this for years," she said sternly. "I’m telling you. No more drugs. Grow up."
"If I throw away all the acid in my freezer, will you marry me? I’m serious. We can even be monogamous."
Shanna tried to looked irritated. "Talk to me about it when you come down. I can’t accept a proposal from a guy who’s too fucked up to write his own name."
"Of course I can write my own name! Give me a pen. No, wait. Find me a really hard book. I’ll show you how well I can read. Then you’ll marry me."
Somehow someone found a copy of the Odyssey. Drexler read the scene where Odysseus comes home and kills the suitors. His dramatic skills were still with him, even though it was pretty clear that a lot of the words held different meanings than usual, or no meanings at all.
Shanna was laughing. "OK, fine," she said. "You win. I’ll marry you. As long as you shut up first."
*
Two hundred laps in the pool, and I wasn’t near done yet. They would throw me out before I’d be tired enough to quit. Butterfly until I was sick, then some breast stroke to calm me down, then freestyle to spin me up again. It was energy created out of desperation, and it was the only thing that would ever feel good again.
Somewhere without me, Deus Ex Machina’s fixed assets were being itemized, assessed, and on their way to being liquidated. Computers I had never seen were being dragged out of closets and priced. Up for grabs were the big table, everything else that could possibly be considered corporate property, even Casa Deus itself, which, unfortunately, was still obscured by scaffolding. At least we didn’t have any investors to pay back.
But Sascha was perpetually immersed in his black, blind depression, and it was a trial to just be around him. So I wasn’t. And, like any family immersed in grief, the Deus Exers were too absorbed in their own second-guessing and recriminations to be much emotional support to me. When had I ever needed emotional support anyway?
High above the top of the water, on the edge of a distant constellation, the lights flickered. Nothing to worry about; just a falling meteor somewhere. They flickered again. Since I was the only person in the pool, the lights may have been trying to tell me something.
I rose painfully to the surface and tread water. The big clock said 2:00; they were going to clean the pool, and it would be closed for the next two hours. I considered what I would be able to do until then: sit in the sauna, maybe, or rent a racquet and play some backboard squash. Maybe I’d volunteer to do the pool vacuuming. Anything but go home.
I heard my name shouted blurrily across the natatorium. "Saa-raa! Come here!" I swam over to the shallow end of the pool and lifted myself up onto the edge. I found myself grabbing onto a Birkenstock. Sascha, Jonathan, Drexler, and Catfood were leaning over me, fully dressed, laptops raised precariously above the water. Drexler was wearing a "Partnership for a Drug-Free America" T-shirt.
Sascha’s face was cold and impenetrable. How could I have ever married him? To me, he felt stripped of everything that was warm and loving, even human. But whatever he and they, the Four Hackers of the Apocalypse, were doing here, it was serious enough for them to leave the relative safety of Casa Deus and come track me into unfamiliar territory. I knew right then that Sascha would be impossible. In order to have any sympathy for him, even as a stranger, I would have to look for whatever traces of the intellectual charm and grace I had loved in him from the first.
"Get out of the pool," he barked. "Now."
Cool yer fuckin’ jets, I thought, but politely hopped out.
"We need to talk. Get dressed."
"Fine," I said in my snottiest possible voice.
Women backed away from us as they followed me into the locker room. I stalked ahead of them, proud, uncaring, water dripping off my long hair and squishing behind my heels.
"Somebody’s going to get a security guard in here in about one second," I said, still not deigning to turn around, when I got to my locker. "You guys have already been arrested once this year. I wouldn’t recommend having it happen again."
"We’ve seen naked women before," said Jonathan. "It’s not that interesting. If it makes you feel better, we won’t stare."
Sascha straddled the bench across from my locker and fired up his laptop. The others, standing around him, whipped theirs out in formation. "Someone---a private investor---has offered to buy all rights to ExCommunicate. I don’t know very much about him. He says he’s offering $150,000, no more. I told him he or one of his representatives can come to the offices with a certified check for that amount. Otherwise, no deal. It’s dangerous, I know, but I’m desperate.
"According to my figures," he continued, "we’re in a hole. Basically, ExCom 3.0 has no customers. We don’t have the personpower or money to build a new version. And if we do tech support on the older versions, we’re going to have to pay for it out of our own pockets anyway." He drummed his fingers on the bench. The rest of us were quiet. "Sara, I can’t let this happen! Where are we going to go? All my work, my ego, my life, for nothing, nothing. I’m such a failure. I might as well die. I would have definitely killed myself before if I knew it was going to end this way."
"What about you guys?" I started stripping off my suit. The entourage looked around uncomfortably. "What do you think? I was under the impression that the company shutting down was already old news. Why do you think it’s worth resuscitating?" I smiled politely. It seemed so easy to talk to anyone but my own husband. He was the one person I didn’t want to appear naked in front of.
None of them seemed particularly eager to leave the sanctuary of the locker room, though. "Look," I said, "I think all of you should just get out of here. We can talk about this when I leave. Can we avoid the scene with the security guard?"
"I’m sure somebody’s been watching us!" wailed Sascha. "Our friend Cass Frick built us a fucking security hole somewhere. And I can’t find it. I should go where I deserve---some dialup line on a dinky ISP somewhere. No. I’ll go to Hell when I die, and Satan’ll force me to use a DOS box with a 1200-baud modem for all eternity."
"I’m trying to think positive," said Catfood, lightly. "Problem is, I can’t social-engineer Frick to find out what she’s still doing. She knows me too well."
I pulled on my shirt. Just in time: The security guard, a large baleful woman in a uniform, whom I had managed to social-engineer more than once myself, was moving purposely towards us. "All of you," I hissed. "Get the fuck out. Now."
They slunk out, prodded by the security guard, who was threatening them with permanent deportation from the Y. But Sascha still stood in the doorway, pallid and proud with despair. "We are failing, and you are not helping one bit. No one is going to buy SWorld, either. I haven’t received any kind of sympathy from you. I never thought marriage would be like this. I think I’m going to go plan my suicide."
I considered Peter’s impending move back to San Francisco. "Why don’t you do that, Sascha. I’m leaving. By the way, Peter Greer wants me to come with him. He says he’s always known that technology on the East Coast was for losers, and he thinks I’m too good to be hanging around with losers."
This statement didn’t have quite the desired impact on Sascha, but it was good enough. His face closed even further in on itself, and he shuddered. "Well, I guess that settles that question for me," he said desolately.
"Yes, I suppose it does," I said. "Goodbye." Naked except for my T-shirt, I stood within inches of his miserable, pale face, sized him up, and slammed the locker room door on him.
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